The
Government’s Every Child a Talker early language
programme focuses on young children’s language development and
identifying difficulties at an early age. There is a strong
emphasis on early intervention.
Be prepared by getting hold of Stories for Talking - a simple
and effective programme that will help you address the speech,
language and communication needs of children in your setting
including children with special needs, language delay, English
as an additional language, and those with attention or listening
difficulties.
Briefly
The introductory chapters are anything but brief! There is
a lot of interesting and well written information covering
storytime - things like the timing, size of the group, language
level of stories, illustrations, repetition, the structure and
nature of stories.
The
author then looks at the core aspects of language and
development - comprehension, expressive language, semantics, the
functional use of language, and attention and listening skills.
In the
third chapter, Rebecca then turns her attention to language
difficulties and supporting strategies. This is packed with
useful analogies and what you can do to help.
Following this there is a detailed explanation of the Stories
for Talking programme and how to implement it. This is
followed by daily activities based on five popular stories:
Dora's Eggs, Goldilocks and the Three Bears,
Washing Line, The Enormous Turnip and Walking in
the Jungle.
You can
decide at what level you feel you need to work. For example, for
each story there is a weekly plan for introducing new vocabulary
(in the case of Dora's Eggs it is around the theme of animals).
Next is a weekly plan for building phrases and sentences (from
two to three word sentences). Next is a weekly plan to help
develop narrative skills. Each is followed by notes on
generalising language and skills within the EYFS. Each story has
its own section of photocopiable resources that are linked to
the daily activities.
This is
truly an impressive package! It's taken us years to get this
ready ... and I think you'll see why. It is pretty amazing.
Find out
what other people think -
read reviews
Here are
some sample pages (pdf)
of the weekly plan for Goldilocks so that you can get an
idea of what to expect. I have included Level 1 - Introducing
vocabulary (but haven't included the photocopiable resources).
