Supporting Early Language Development

Spirals for babies and toddlers

Marion Nash, Jackie Lowe, David Leah

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136492921
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Early years practitioners, parents and carers, child minders, health visitors do you need effective ideas for giving your babies and toddlers support to become confident talkers?

National research shows that poor language and communication skills have a profound effect on the life chances of children and young people. This highly practical book will enable you to give children in your care the help they need to build their crucial language skills at the earliest point in their development.

Based on the author's highly regarded SPIRALS language development programme, the book provides over 40 tried and tested sessions to help develop children's early speech, language and communication. Each language concept is introduced one at a time and builds on the most frequently used words by infants. It suggests ways to use music, repetition, simple meaningful gestures and signing to reinforce children's understanding.

Features include:

• Clear guidelines for introducing specific games and activities at the right developmental level for babies and toddlers to develop their language skills from 0 to 3 ½ years
• Ideas for progression based on child development
• Insights into the underlying psychology of the activities we suggest
• Advice on when to begin to use small group activities
• Guidance on what to do if a child is reluctant to join in.
• Practical suggestions for involving parents as partners
• Photocopiable recording sheets
• Suggestions for further reading and resources.

Written by a leading authority in the field, this exciting new resource provides everything you need to support young children's language skills at the earliest point in their development.

Section 1

More about this book

One day when I was running a ‘welcome to nursery’ session, I met a lovely mum who was absolutely aware of the best food to give her lovely twin babies and the best way to care for them practically. Then I started talking to the group about the need to talk to babies from the earliest moment so that they can build their early language skills. This lovely mum shocked me by saying, with a laugh, that she never talked to her babies, as they couldn’t answer her and she would feel silly speaking to them. I never forgot that day and this book is perhaps the result. Of course, we must speak to babies as soon as they are born, even before! Adults are so important in mediating the environment, making it more understandable for them, so that babies and young children can learn about language and life.

In this book Jackie and I are building on what we do in our work. We want passionately to remind everyone who spends time with babies and toddlers how important they are to the children they care for. We want to keep repeating the message that you need to give quality face-to-face time talking and communicating with the child from birth (or before) as well as supporting the child to investigate the world for themselves through exploration and play as little scientists and explorers. This book will give you practical ideas, based in psychology, on how to provide vital language and communication skills with your babies and toddlers using play activities that you are both likely to enjoy.

This book is aimed at supporting the practice of practitioners working with babies and the younger preschool child up to three-and-a-half years of age. David looked at the first section of the book as a training guide for personal and professional development for practitioners. It would also be particularly useful for parents, carers, health visitors and childminders.

The first section of the book is intended to be used for everyday guidance in supporting language and communication development with the children. Practitioners in early years settings supporting older children with moderate-to-significant language delay will also find the guidance useful using the developmental sequence of the language rather than the age levels. The nature of the delay would guide the practitioner as to the best developmental level to which gear the activities and games for the child.

Language develops in a sequence in a spiral process and we can use many activities and strategies to support this. Each child will need different-sized steps in the spiral of learning; some children will cope well with bigger jumps while others will need tiny steps and lots of repetition and reinforcement to help them remember and use what they have learned. For young children we want to provide contexts that will foster play that will naturally elicit certain types of language and repeat the key language for the child. The traditional treasure baskets and vocabulary treasure baskets can be used to provide lots of lovely opportunities for babies to practise exploring everyday objects. These can be exciting for the young child.

Next, at nine months, we suggest the introduction of vocabulary baskets to help to develop naming of objects through play. The concept treasure baskets come next in the spiral of language learning; they give the child the chance to explore objects that are big and little and to begin to understand the meaning of the concept words. They learn about what happens when we say ‘more’. They also need the chance to learn about ‘more’ in different contexts such as at snack, when they are offered more drink, or in the sand tray when you ask if they would like more sand in their bucket, or more water in their jug in the water play area. This makes a bridge of learning and experience from your activities to other areas of the child’s experience. Its not that we don’t say these words to children but that we need to make sure that we all do it consistently and often enough for it to make a difference their language

Older infants can explore a ‘verb box’ with objects that help them to explore particular action words with you; so, for example, they may find various objects to interact with actively, such as a brush, and then they can hear and use the words ‘brush’ and ‘brushing’ in their play. We cannot include all the necessary words and concepts and skill developments in this book but we have included key examples, and these should give ideas for further activities that practitioners and parents can develop in order to continue their good work.

Signing and meaningful gestures are highly recommended to help children’s understanding and use of communication. However, please note that just as we should not overload a child with spoken language, we also should not overload them with signing or gesture. Choose signs to support the key word or concept you are working on. Give parents a little guide so that they can use and understand the children’s signs at home too.

A friend who has worked with mothers and their babies and toddlers for many years asked me to say that signing supports talking; it goes alongside it. She was concerned that sometimes people tend to use signs instead of talking to their baby. You need to use the sign to support the key word as you are saying it.

An important message for practitioners, parents, older brothers and sisters, grandparents, childminders

You all have such an important part to play in helping babies and toddlers to be successful in reaching the highest spiral of learning that they can. Developing a child’s language will support them in developing their other important areas of learning and give them valuable life skills.

Practitioners can choose activities to be sent home to parents to give them new ideas for ways to promote language opportunities with their children. Then the equipment and ideas are all ready to hand for parents to use at home with their child. A camera could be sent home for parents to take photographs of the child involved in the activities, and this could be included to record a child’s learning journey. A simple explanation of each activity is all that is needed as the games and ideas are self-explanatory. There are suggestions in this book for what you can do if you find that a child cannot play a particular game or won’t join in an activity with you.

Every child is an individual and will have their own pace of learning. Some children have a brisk pace while others need more time for thinking things through, and we need to respect this.

Marion provides flexible training courses at different levels. These can be seen on her website (www.spiralstraining.co.uk). There is also an outline of training courses available at the back of this book. David is an FE specialist and can advise on queries regarding training.

Four learning spirals explained

Training guidance

Spiral of language learning

Young babies and toddlers are developing the key skills that underpin their later language learning. These skills involve looking, focusing listening, attending and concentrating for longer and longer periods. Long before a baby can speak, they begin to develop an understanding of how communication works. They need to build their store of knowledge in their early years to support their progress in all areas of talk. Understanding can be supported through gesture and signing. Spoken language begins with sounds. Babies begin to experiment with sounds and we call that babbling. Words begin to emerge and a growing vocabulary that the child can understand and then learn to speak. Concepts are more difficult to grasp and need to be experienced with concrete examples that they can watch alongside the words that describe them. Examples of early concepts are on, off, more, in, out, big, little, whereas the concept of under comes later. Language is then developed further by the older child into longer phrases and early sentences. If babies are ‘saturated’ with the experience of hearing language, as long as they don’t have any specific difficulties they can learn the names for things and then concepts, and then come to understand and use them. These are the spirals of language learning that we support in this book.

Spiral of learning about communication

Babies need help to learn how to act with other people. You can help this development by lots of face-to-face activities using gestures, sing-song rhymes and facial expressions to show how turn-taking in communicating with others works and how to recognise and express emotions. The young child needs to learn that communication is a two-way process. At first this will be within the immediate family. The young child will soon need to know how to act with people outside the immediate family, practitioners in their early years setting, other children, teachers,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Section
• 2 Activities to develop language at different ages and stages
• Spirals Training
• Index