 Welcome to our second Communication, Language and Literacy Bulletin for the Early Years.
These themed bulletins will come out to you once a month to provide you with practical ideas and information to use in your setting to develop language and literacy practice and provision, but to also share with parents so that the home learning environment can be one of high-quality interactions!
 Share the BBC's Tiny Happy People website with your parents. There are so many activity ideas and links to songs and nursery rhymes on the website.
You could start with just sharing one rhyme. Click on this link to hear and reflect on how you could share this with your parents: Jack and Jill - BBC Tiny Happy People
You could share this information with parents too: Why do we sing nursery rhymes? 7 benefits of nursery rhymes - BBC Tiny Happy People
 Don’t forget to use the DfE Resources Hub. You could share some of the clips in staff meetings or suggest in supervisions that practitioners use the activity suggestions to boost communication and language skills: Communication and language - Help for early years providers - GOV.UK (education.gov.uk)
In the next article you will see one of the suggested activities. Not only will this encourage opportunities for talk, modelling sentence construction, vocabulary extension and back and forth interactions, but children will be able to see how books can be made, take pride in their work, raise their self-esteem and be introduced to the wonderful world of literacy and reading.
 Story scribing:
Children are born communicators and often practice their developing language skills by engaging in story-telling, through role play, small world and made-up games.
You can encourage and support this exploration of early language by scaffolding children's learning and writing down exactly what children say, in the form of story books, for them to enjoy over and over again. Young children love repetition and this type of activity will offer important opportunities for them to feel their voice has been heard.
For younger children, story scribing may involve creating picture books of recent experiences, such as trips to the park or birthday parties, with key people and phrases included. These can be created using pre-made photo albums or simply by stringing together printed photographs. Often these can be contributed to by parents or carers and allow practitioners to gain a deeper understanding of a child's home learning environment, including key vocabulary.
For older children, you can transcribe more elaborate and creative experiences such as children's own interpretations of familiar stories, superhero play adventures or the 'rules' of a game the children have invented. Again, these can be made into a paper story book or displayed as storyboards for children to return to and follow.
Often, children enjoy re-enacting these stories with practitioners and their peers, so a simple marked out, 'performance area' or cardboard box 'theatre' may support children to share and enjoy these 'stories' further.
Taken from the DfE website, 'Help for Early Years Providers'.
 We have a LIVE virtual training session coming up on 2 December 9.00am - 11.00am - 'Linking Language to Literacy in the Early Years'. Book here to join us! You can use one of your allocated workshop places if you have a package with us, or PAYG for £35.
We will be exploring what the much publicised 'word gap' is and how to narrow that gap by immersing your children in a world of strong context driven vocabulary and back and forth interactions.
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