Every Child a Talker Policy

Every Child a Talker Policy

Supporting Children’s Speaking and Listening Skills.

Policy amended: October 2016 – Laura Dolby

Adopted by a Governor :

Every child has the right to an education that develops their talents. This education must nurture a child’s respect for themselves, others and their environment.

(UNCRC. Article 29)

Gifted and Talented at Alfreton Nursery School

Statement on philosophy and practice

It is every child’s entitlement to an education which stimulates and challenges their abilities and interests. For children who demonstrate abilities that are deemed to be higher than expected, their right to have their potential turned into performance is embraced. As a school we recognise our responsibility to nurture intellectual curiosity.

Development Matters in The Early years Foundation Stage documentation states that…

‘Children are born ready and eager to learn, they actively reach out to engage with other people, and in the world around them. Development is not an automatic process; however it depends on each unique child having opportunities to interact in positive relationships and enabling environments.’

The ability to talk and develop communication skills has a huge impact on children’s overall development in all areas of their learning. It impacts on their ability to make social connections with friends and people close to them and to make connections with the world in which they live.

Children learn to communicate well before their first words are spoken and adults are the vital key to developing these skills through important early interaction and communication, right from the very start of their life. Young babies learn to understand and decode non verbal communication as they begin to use it themselves to communicate their needs and wants, these are vital skills to masteras 50% of our communication is delivered through non verbal communication. They also need to developtheir attentiveness as thishelps to support their listening skills as they tune in to the noises, sound patterns and words around them that will later develop into their own speech and language patterns. The rate of vocabulary development is influenced by the sheer amount of talk that they hear.

Language is a cognitive process that develops in a social context, so interaction and communication from caring and responsive adults is fundamental for supporting every child’s communication development.

Children need to be able to understand language, both spoken and non verbal, this includes developing their ability to look and attend, listen and hear, and remember,as well as developing their understandingof words and sentences and their meanings.

Children also need to be able to use expressive language and this includes choosing words as they decide what to say, being able to compose and order their sentence structures, be articulate in their ability to pronounce and be able to speak appropriately and with fluency.

Templin (1957) estimated that by the age of 6 years, children have an average vocabulary of 14,000 words.

Carey (1978) suggested that they would need to learn 8 new words a day between the ages of 18 months and 6 years old to be able to achieve this.

The development of children’s communication skills is therefore a very complex process and children need support to practice and master these skills within an environment of support, stimulation and understanding towards each of their individual language development needs.

It is essential that this continuity of support and understanding is developed in partnership with the child’s family and that we work closely with families to ensure that they too have the confidence and understanding to support and develop their child’s ability to communicate.

We aim to develop parent’s awareness of the importance of talking and sharing in communication within the family environment and community, through providing information, both generally and specifically and creating exciting home activities that they can enjoy sharing and communicating with as they play, talk and have fun learning together.

We also provide stimulating activities that promote talking and communicating within the nursery that draw on the strengths and skills of individual team members that are able to deliver and develop essential communication skills that are tuned in to the needs of the children within each activity.

We currently have a level 3 fully qualified Early Language Lead Practitioner that has completed the Every Child a Talker Training Programme. She has disseminated her skills throughout the whole nursery team to ensure that each Practitioner has some level of awareness for the importance of developing language and talk, and the understanding and the knowledge needed to be able to deliver this successfully.

The Early Lead Practitioner has introduced new initiatives to promote and enhance talk further throughout the nursery. Even though talking has always been a high priority and a quality that has been observed to be outstanding throughout the nursery practice, the Early Lead Practitioner felt that a little fine tuning would make it even better.

Talking time has been introduced and has already developed and become specified for particular individual children’s needs. All children have the opportunity to engage in a talking time activity during the week.Talking times are differentiated to support all levels of developments in talk including Charlie Chatterbox and the Aspiration Group and Social Singing Time.

The role of the level 3 Practitioner is to identify individual children; from the time they come into the nursery. This is done using the child monitoring tool which helps to identify any areas within the 4 areas of language development where the child may be having difficulty. These 4 areas are:

Listening and Attention

Understanding (Receptive Language)

Talking (Expressive Language)

Social Communication

The children that are identified as having a specific difficulty will be monitored throughout their time at nursery and initiatives put in place to help and support their communication skills. These children will be reassessed each term and the data collected will provide the information that we need to see,that shows what kind of impact the initiatives are having on the progress that our children are making in their ability to communicate.

Where progress is causing due concern, The Lead Practitioner will communicate with parents, offering extra support and advice, and where necessary she will encourage and support the parents to allow their child to be referred to a speech and language therapist. The Lead Practitioner will then work closely with the speech therapist and the family to ensure continuity of learning and to give the parents the confidence theyneed to support their child throughout the process.

The Lead Practitioner is now working alongside a team member, supporting her confidence and helping her to develop the skills to be able to support the specific language needs of referred children. She is also being supported in her confidence to be able to communicate and share knowledge and information with boththe children’s families and the SLT as well as developing resources to support specific language needs. Support is also being given to her engaging in the ECAT process, including identification, monitoring and data production.

Talking time is one of our main initiatives and it has now been refined into different areas of development. Charlie Chatterbox supports those children who need to focus in a small group to develop their listening and attention skills, their ability to pronounce and structure their language clearly and generally support early language skills that they may be struggling with.

These activities may occur in a small magic room session with no more than 2 children, or in a bigger carefully supported group time such as Social Singing time.

On Fridays certain children may join Roly Poly Friday , here they develop and strengthen their core muscles through a physical programme that looks at the key areas for development, i.e. crawling, rolling, jumping and balancing. The need for a strong core has been highlighted by research showing that children are increasingly being identified as having weakness in this area of strength due to the time they have been left in car seats and buggies, limiting their ability to physically move around as much as they have needed to. This is having a huge impact later in their schooling leading to difficulties particularly in their writing skills.

This group may include children identified through both the ECAM programme as well as the ECAT programme and may include children that need more confidence to communicate in a small group, or children that need to develop their listening an attention skills.

Roly Poly Friday incudes repetitive rhymes and songs, so their physical skills are developing alongside their language skills. It’s popular and the children love to engage in the programme.

Grandpa Joe’s encourages certain children to be drawn into the role play area and then engage in social talking and turn taking with others around them to develop their social confidences. This is supported by early morning snack time with Tracey, THE EARLY BIRDS!!!. These opportunities enable less confident children to engage in a regular social eating experience where lots of time and attention can be given to their individual needs and confidences to engage in conversation is always nurtured and encouraged.

Social singing time supports and develops these skills further in the security that singing provides for them, as they don’t have to rely on word finding, they can follow the words provided for them, encouragingtheir own confidences in communication within a positive social experience. Children that are identified as having difficulties in this area of their talking follow a carefully developed programme that supports their skills amongst a small group of peers. Whichever group they begin within they stay in, again to support confidence and relationship building within their group of peers as their social confidence develops. They are then supported to develop these skills within the main nursery environment to help them to begin to apply the skills they have gained within a busier and more challenging environment.

The Aspiration group supports, challenges and extends language within those children that have well established talking and communication skills. There is a different focus each day and children are encouraged to use their language skills to explore more complex concepts and reflect on their own levels of understanding. Global issues, phonic awareness, rights and responsibilities, emotional literacy, creative thinking/questioning and personalised learning are all aspects of their weekly opportunities and these opportunities enable children to talk and share freely, whilst also developing an awareness of their audience.

Talking Time has also now become a main focus for the whole nursery and is available as an activity in the main area of nursery every Thursday. Charlie Chatterbox supports this activity and it aims to give all the children an opportunity to talk and share in their communication with others around them. The talking Chair is available if they have the confidence and want to sit on it and talk to their friends and Charlie, it also gives those children that are less confidence an incentive to try, as they all want to sit on the chair!!

The other chairs are clearly created into listening chairs, reinforcing the importance of listening to others and responding where appropriate. This activity is hugely popular with the children who are applying their thinking skills, their listening and attention skills as they use increasingly detailed talk to communicate within a small group. The imagination basket is now used as a talking time stimulus and encourages the children to use the vocabulary they have developed over the week as their knowledge of the story, the basket is based upon, has developed. The basket provides props, costumes and resources that encourage their storytelling and narrative skills, as well as developing their ability to predict and recall or simply describe what they see in an illustration. The talking chair aims to inspire and encourage their own talk,nurturing them to initiate and recall personal experiences, with careful interaction and support from the skilled Practitioner. Careful questioning is used to support the children to extend their thinking skills and develop their ability to begin to create narrative & sequencing into their spoken language. The children are also encouraged to develop their understanding for the importance of when to listen and respond as they learn the art of conversation. Charlie uses his skills to nurture and support everyone and enables all children to be successful.

At Maisy’s story time, the children have the opportunity to sit on the Clever Chair, this is for those children that gain a clever badge over the nursery session and is an opportunity for them to share and communicate with their friends the reason they were so clever. The other children are taught to be respectful whilst their friend is sharing this message and understand what that entails. If a child isn’t confident to do this, then this is always respected, but they always have the opportunity to choose to do so if they wish.

Singing is an important and essential aspect of language development and the children have opportunities for developing their singing skills throughout the week. For some children that are struggling with the confidence to vocalise, or those that have difficulty in sentence structure or have minimal language, singing can make a huge difference to them because the word finding and sentence structure is already done for them. They have the confidence to sing within a group as the attention on them is lessened and they can explore with their voices, listening and learning within their peers extending their pitching and vocalisation skills. We regularly observe those children that are reluctant to talk, singing from the bottom of their hearts and enjoying being successful in their communication through song.

The importance of singing is communicated on a one to one with families of children that would benefit from singing more within the family and resources have been provided to help families to achieve this at home.

Rhyme sacks have begun to be developed and these consist of a microphone, an instrument, a puppet to support the song and a rhyme for the children to sing.

We also learn a poem of the week, each week, to help to extend the children’s repertoire of poems and rhymes. Singing Hands, where the children sing and sign, is a weekly singing activity which is very popular and supports those children that may choose to communicate more through gestures, or who have very limited verbal skills. It encourages all the children to use some basic signing skills to enable them to communicate with their peers that may find verbalisation a challenge. The nursery team encourage the extension of the children’s signing throughout their nursery interactions.

To support and extend talking skills an information board called LET’S TALK has been developed for parents to access and read within the nursery.

Chatterboxes, and chatterbags, have been developed as a resource for supporting and developing talk through play within the home. The importance of encouraging parents to engage in their children’s play, to support and extend their children’s talking is emphasised to the parents when the chatterbox, or bag, is given to their child. The children have the Chatterbox for a whole week which gives the families ample time to enjoy the play and extend the language that their child develops around it. It is also emphasised to parents how important it is to allow the child to lead the talking and to give positive praise and non verbal gestures to develop their confidence to want to talk more. A feedback book is available for parent’s to make comments in and this is also a valuable resource because it also instils confidence in parents when they reflect on the impact that has been achieved with other families.

Other great resources are also available for families to take home and all can be a real inspiration to inspire talking and sharing in language experiences within the family, these include:

Story sacks, baking baskets, Healthy Eating bags, library books, Numeracy story bags, Squiggle Wiggle bags, singing bags and get active sacks.

We strive very hard to inspire communication with our children both within the nursery and the home and are always seeking new initiatives to do this.

We want every child to be a talker and to have the best start that they can on their journey with Communication.

Policy written by Laura Dolby – November 2011-11-10

Amended October 2016