EYITT Early Years Initial Teacher Training Graduate Employment

EYITT Early Years Initial Teacher Training Graduate Employment Based Programme CPLD Day 1 CHILD DEVELOPMENT 27 th September 2018

Aims of this session • To link theories of child development to practice • To understand the role of Sustained Shared Thinking • To link theories of cognitive development to practice • To understand the role of the environment in supporting effective development

Covered in this session • Perceptions of learning • Sustained Shared Thinking and related practice • Theories of child development and related practice • Cognitive development • Development of language • Language rich environment

Good Quality Reflection “How do you know? ” Why? Look Listen Note – get to know a child better and develop positive relationships with children and their parents – plan appropriate play and learning experiences based on the children’s interests and needs – and identify any concerns about a child’s development – further develop your understanding of a child’s development – develop a systematic and routine approach to using observations; – use assessment to plan the next steps in a child’s developmental progress and regularly review this approach. The Early Years Foundation Stage Practice Guidance © Crown copyright 2008

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What does it look like to the children? • In a group of four, read the ‘Reflective practice – case study. ’ • What would you do differently? • How do you ensure that the child is part of the ‘learning loop’?

Dweck • Dweck (1999, 2006) has emphasised the importance of children’s self-theories of intelligence for their response to schooling. • Her research shows that some children have an entity or fixed theory of intelligence, which leads them to consider effort as negative (if learning requires effort, they cannot be intelligent) and to adopt performance goals (for example scoring well on tests). • Other children have an incremental or growth theory of intelligence, seeing it as a malleable quality that can be changed by effort. These children adopt learning goals and feel that they need to work harder if they do not understand something. • Dweck’s research suggests that children’s beliefs about intelligence can be altered by feedback from teachers, who should try and praise effort rather than performance. • Dweck shows that receiving praise for effort rather than for performance increases the motivation to learn.

Sustained Shared Thinking An episode in which two or more individuals “work together” in an intellectual way to solve a problem, clarify a concept, evaluate activities, extend a narrative etc. Both parties must contribute to the thinking and it must develop and extend. Siraj-Blatchford et al. , REPEY, Df. ES 2002 » Look Listen Note • • • Observe body language; look at what they’re doing Listen to the dialogue Maintain eye contact What if? What else could we try? Thinking out loud Maybe…. . How can I encourage them to think critically? Get the environment right – especially important for pre-verbal children where SST is linked to sensory exploration Am I asking this question for myself or for the benefit of the child? ? In pairs read and discuss the transcripts given. Assess the effectiveness of the interaction and, using the prompts on the screen to help you, outline how SST has/hasn’t been used effectively to move the learning forward

Using SST • Which interaction is the most effective and why? • How could the least effective interaction be improved?

Author’s analysis (How do you know? ) Transcript 1: - • • • The boys are engaged in purposeful play. Play with which they are confident and familiar. They do not actually need adult intervention because they are achieving their own goals for their own purposes very successfully. The teacher does not stop and watch and listen before intervening. She presumes that the focus of the boys’ attention is on creating a ‘story’ around their castle. In fact they are simply ‘building’. They were enjoying the familiar routine of constructing what was quite a complex model and were also enjoying each other’s company. They had previously been engaged in a rather boisterous, whole group session of ‘Letters and Sounds’, and seemed to have returned to their castle for some quiet downtime, By speaking without tuning in to the boys’ play, the teacher interfered with both the mood of the play and its purpose. Because the teacher believed that asking questions would somehow enhance the learning she actually interfered with it. Firstly, she distracted the boys from their play by asking ‘What are you doing? ’, when some quiet observation would have answered that question. Then she persisted with a line of questioning that was attempting to manipulate the boys towards the purpose she had already assumed to be their purpose. She was not sufficiently sensitive to pick up that the boys were not responding with enthusiasm for or interest in the exchange, and that she had, in fact, stopped the play and taken its momentum away. She is uncomfortable with the boys’ lack of engagement with her and so fills the silences with further questions. Rather than be interrogated in this way, the boys chose to leave. What does the child/children gain?

Author’s analysis (How do you know? ) Transcript 2: • This transcript shows how attentive practitioners have to be to the twists and turns of children’s thinking and conversation. From snails to koalas to manicures to fingers being chopped off, this teacher moves effortlessly to follow the girls’ thinking and to make appropriate responses. Some of the teacher’s answers are complex. But she knows the girls well and can see they are listening. • In this instance, the girls have asked for an explanation, and therefore have a vested interest in the teacher’s answer. They also show their understanding by asking a follow-up question of their own ‘By the slime? ’ • The interaction between these two girls is sustained because of the close, warm relationship the practitioner has (the close body contact is evidence of that in that she doesn’t flinch or move away, for example, when the first child wipes paper over her ‘slimy’ forehead). • She tunes in to each change of theme; the problems she sets are genuine (‘I’ve got a lump on that finger…. What do you think you could do about that? ’). Her tone of voice is respectful and she treats the girls as conversational equals. • What does the child/children gain?

Co-regulation • Emotional development before social development • Self-regulation – managing own emotions and intentions • Co-regulation - based on positive interactions that underpin ability to control behaviour, thoughts and feelings • ‘Transitional processes in a learner’s acquisition of SRL, during which members of a community share a common problem-solving plane, and SRL is gradually appropriated in response to and directed toward social and cultural contexts. ’* • ‘During co-regulatory activity, all participants assume expert and novice roles through varying aspects of the shared activity. ’* • Links to Zone of Proximinal Development (Vygotsky) – the difference between what we can do without help and what we can’t do without help – role of scaffolding *(Self-Regulation, Coregulation, and Socially Shared Regulation: Exploring Perspectives of Social in Self-Regulated Learning Theory. A Hadwin, M Oshige. University of Victoria (2011)

Self-regulation supported by Co-regulation ‘From co-regulation in the zone of proximal development emerge (a) self-regulation (adaptive learning, motivation, and identity), and (b) social and cultural enrichment. ’ Self-regulation: ‘There is extensive evidence (Rosenthal & Zimmerman, 1978) that adult models withdraw their support as observing youngsters display emulative accuracy. Reciprocally, these youngsters, seeing their increased proficiency, seek to perform on their own, such as when a young boy spurns further assistance from his mother when he feels he can tie his own shoelaces. At this point, the boy’s reliance on his mother as a social model becomes selective, and he will seek assistance from her mainly when he encounters obstacles, such as a novel type of shoelace. (Zimmerman, 2002, p. 5)’ Co-regulation: ‘The mother might ask questions like: What do you know about how to connect those two laces? How do you know when you have completed the first step properly? What do you need to do now? ’ (Self-Regulation, Coregulation, and Socially Shared Regulation: Exploring Perspectives of Social in Self-Regulated Learning Theory. A Hadwin, M Oshige. University of Victoria (2011)

SSTEW • Choose a section that aligns with an area for development in your practice? – Spend a few minutes discussing this with a partner – What has intrigued you? – What would you like to change?

Pre-verbal foundations for SST • • • Sustained eye contact between adult and child Sustained attention between adult and child Song and rhyme Peek-a-boo activities Treasure baskets – what are the properties of this object?

Theories/theorists Pre CPLD day task • In groups of four, take 2 minutes each to present your findings linked to a theory/theorist and outline how this relates to practice

Sub-standards linked to theories of development • • • 2. 2 Recognise that children are active learners from birth. Early Years Teachers understand how babies and children learn and develop, and support them to continue to explore, and consolidate their previous learning and development. Early Years Teachers know and understand that the characteristics of effective learning underpin learning and development and take into account the ways in which children engage with others and their environment. 2. 3 Know that all children need consistent relationships in order to be secure, happy and confident. Early Years Teachers recognise the relevance of attachment theory and its significance for babies and young children, particularly when separated from their primary carer for the first time. They support and work together with parents/carers through a key person approach to plan provision that ensures each child feels emotionally secure. 2. 4 Improve children’s thinking skills by leading, modelling and engaging them in high quality interactions involving sustained shared thinking. These opportunities can be planned or unplanned helping children to make connections in their learning and enabling practitioners to recognise how to effectively capture children’s imaginations, clarify their ideas, ask questions and be creative. Early Years Teachers enhance and develop children’s thinking and creativity encouraging them to regularly try out new activities. 3. 1 Have a clear understanding of theories of child development and recognise that children are active learners from birth: even young babies will have had a range of experiences and developed their own skills and interests. Early Years Teachers understand how children learn and develop, and support them to continue to explore, and consolidate their previous learning and development. 3. 3 Support the development of babies, toddlers and young children’s learning as outlined in the EYFS. Understand theories of learning and development that form the foundations of the EYFS and demonstrate the ability to critically analyse children’s learning and development. Early Years Teachers recognise that by the time children reach the end of the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), some will have achieved or exceeded the early learning goals, whilst others will still be working towards them. Early Years Teachers have an appreciation of the Primary National Curriculum, they understand how this follows on from the EYFS and they support young children’s transition to school and furthering education. 4. 2 Balance routine and flexibility, ensuring that provision is personalised and based on observation and assessment of children’s stage of development, needs and interests. 8. 3 Work in partnership with colleagues and wider professionals to enhance children’s wellbeing, learning and development. Early Years Teachers lead colleagues ensuring they are equipped with the appropriate skills, knowledge and strategies required for effective partnership working. 8. 4 Ensure they have the depth and breadth of knowledge and understanding and the skill to work effectively with others to enable them to lead and model best practice 8. 6 Provide and deliver high quality provision that promotes children’s wellbeing and supports their learning and development. Using information and evidence from emerging and established research and national policy, Early Years Teachers will propose changes to effect continuous improvement, influencing practice, plans and policies of the setting.

Cognitive development and learning - Goswami Learning • Statistical learning by neural networks - The brain learns the statistical structure of experienced events, building neural networks to represent this information • Learning by imitation - babies as young as one hour old could imitate gestures like tongue protrusion and mouth opening after watching an adult produce the same gestures. • Learning by analogy - noticing similarities between one situation and another, or between one problem and another. This similarity then becomes a basis for applying analogous solutions. • Causal learning – infants see a variety of instantiations of a particular phenomenon, such as objects falling, and need to work out what causes them to fall. Knowledge construction • Nai ve physics - Perception organises itself fairly rapidly around a core framework representing the arrangement of cohesive, solid, three-dimensional objects which are embedded in a series of mechanical relations such as pushing, blocking and support • Nai ve biology - Children learn that things that move on their own are animate agents, and that their movements are not predictable but are caused by their own internal states • Nai ve psychology and ‘theory of mind’ - they learn the correlations and conditional probabilities embedded in the human behaviour around them, for example the kinds of events that lead to happiness or to anger • Cognitive neuroscience: the mirror neuron system - Mirror neurons were found to activate when the monkey performed object-directed actions such as tearing, grasping, holding and manipulating, and the same neurons also fired when the animal observed someone else performing the same class of actions.

Continued……. Memory • The development of episodic memory - Remembering is embedded in larger social and cognitive activities, and therefore the knowledge structures that young children bring to their experiences are a critical factor in explaining memory development and learning. • Working memory - Working memory (WM) is a limited capacity ‘workspace’ that maintains information temporarily while it is processed for use in other cognitive tasks, such as reasoning, comprehension and learning Pretend play and the imagination • The development of pretend play imagination - Pretending develops during the second year of life, with early pretence typically tied to the veridical actions that people make on objects (for example a 12 -month-old ‘drinking’ from an empty cup) and later pretence being more detached from object identities (for example a 2 -year-old pretending a stick is a horse) • The role of the imagination in cognitive development - While Western psychology has focussed on the important role of imaginative play in enabling a deeper understanding of mind (social cognitive development), Russian psychology has emphasised effects on cognitive selfregulation (executive function, see 6). Vygotsky (1978) argued that the imagination represented a specifically human form of cognitive activity. According to his theory, a central developmental function of pretend play was that children had to act against their immediate impulses and follow the ‘rules of the game’. Metacognition and executive function - Metacognition is knowledge about cognition, encompassing factors such as knowing about your own information-processing skills, monitoring your own cognitive performance, and knowing about the demands made by different kinds of cognitive tasks. Executive function refers to gaining strategic control over your own mental processes, inhibiting certain thoughts or actions, and developing conscious control over your thoughts, feelings and behaviour. • The development of metamemory - children’s awareness of themselves as memorisers, for example their awareness of their strengths and weaknesses in remembering certain types of information • The development of inhibitory control - strategic control over behaviour and of the inhibition of inappropriate behaviours. Inductive and deductive reasoning • Deductive reasoning - Deductive reasoning problems have only one logically valid answer • Inductive reasoning - he most important constraint on inductive reasoning is similarity

Implications for practice • • • Learning in young children is socially mediated. Families, peers and teachers are all important. Even basic perceptual learning mechanisms such as the statistical learning of linguistic sounds requires direct social interaction to be effective. This limits the benefits of educational approaches such as e-learning in the early years. Learning by the brain depends on the development of multi-sensory networks of neurons distributed across the entire brain. For example, a concept in science may depend on neurons being simultaneously active in visual, spatial, memory, deductive and kinaesthetic regions, in both brain hemispheres. Ideas such as left-brain/right-brain learning, or unisensory ‘learning styles’ (visual, auditory or kinaesthetic) are not supported by the brain science of learning. Children construct explanatory systems to understand their experiences in the biological, physical and psychological realms. These are implicit causal frameworks, for example that explain why other people behave as they are observed to do, or why objects or events follow observed patterns. Knowledge gained through active experience, language, pretend play and teaching are all important for the development of children’s causal explanatory systems. Children’s causal biases (eg. the essentialist bias) should be recognised and built upon in primary education.

Continued…. • • • Children think and reason largely in the same ways as adults. However, they lack experience, and they are still developing important metacognitive and executive function skills. Learning in classrooms can be enhanced if children are given diverse experiences and are helped to develop self-reflective and self-regulatory skills via teacher modelling, conversation and guidance around social situations like play, sharing and conflict resolutions. Language is crucial for development. The ways in which teachers talk to children can influence learning, memory, understanding and the motivation to learn. There also enormous individual differences in language skills between children in the early years. Interactions around books are one of the best ways of developing more complex language skills. Incremental experience is crucial for learning and knowledge construction. The brain learns the statistical structure of ‘the input’. It can be important for teachers to assess how much ‘input’ a child’s brain is actually getting when individual differences appear in learning. Differential exposure (for example to spoken or written language) will lead to differential learning. As an example, one of the most important determinants of reading fluency is how much text the child actually reads, including outside the classroom. Thinking, reasoning and understanding can be enhanced by imaginative or pretend play contexts. However, scaffolding by the teacher is required if these are to be effective. Individual differences in the ability to benefit from instruction (the zone of proximal development) and individual differences between children are large in the primary years, hence any class of children must be treated as individuals.

Attachment Theories • According to Bowlby (1980) an individual who has experienced a secure attachment ‘is likely to possess a representational model of attachment figure(s) as being available, responsive, and helpful’ • Ainsworth (1978) suggested the ‘care-giver sensitivity hypothesis’ is an explanation for different attachment types. Ainsworth’s maternal sensitivity hypothesis argues that a child’s attachment style is dependent on the behaviour their mother shows towards them.

‘There is evidence that just one relationship with a carergiver. . . who is capable of autobiographical reflection, in other words a caregiver who provides a high reflective selffunction, can enhance the resilience of an individual. Through just one relationship with an understanding other, trauma can be transformed and its effects neutralized or counteracted. ’ (Fosha, 2003) Secure Attachment Sensitive responsive care-giving Child feels: Trust in self Trust in others ‘I am good, you are good’ Ambivalent Attachment Inconsistent caregiving Child feels: Distress in self Needy of others ‘You will attend to me but I fear abandonment’ Avoidant Attachment Rejecting caregiving Child feels: Trust in self Distrust towards others ‘I will do it by myself, I fear closeness’ Disorganised Attachment Frightening caregiving Child feels: Frightened of self Frightened of others ‘I am powerful, I am scared, I fear’ Children who feel unsafe rarely relax. They engage in only sporadic exploration as their focus is on ensuring survival. The second goal of parenting interventions is to help the child experience comfort and co-regulation. (Howe, 2005)

Stages of attachment • Indiscriminant—Birth to 5 or 6 months or so • Discriminant— 5 or 6 months to 12 months or so • Separation Anxiety— 12 months to 18 months or so • Stranger Anxiety— 18 months to 24 months or so Activity: Split into 4 groups – take a category – discuss and outline strategies you might employ. Walk the room and look at other categories – add something if you feel it appropriate

Schemas • Schemas are patterns of repeated behaviours that may be observed in young children’s play as they explore and make sense of the world around them. Using their senses and movements, children may show their fascination for moving things here and there, hiding things in small enclosed places, covering themselves and objects, throwing things and watching them fall, and so on. • Schemas are an intrinsic part of child development. They are important to our understanding of how some children learn. Knowing about schemas offers a positive view of children’s actions and enables parents and practitioners to make sense of what children are doing. • Schemas operate at different levels in child development. For children under three years of age, learning develops through ‘sensorimotor’ experiences (absorbing information through what they see, taste, touch, hear and smell and through their own movements) and ‘symbolic representation’ (when they make something stand for something else). Early schemas provide the basis for later learning and development of ‘abstract thought’. *Oxfordshire County Council

Schemas and the under 3 s Schema Transporting Enveloping Trajectory (straight lines) What it means Moving resources and self from place to place Covering themselves or other items Learning about movement of things and self in vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines, still and in motion Examples of what a child may do What adults could do to extend Carries items to a special person; moves objects in wheeled toys; puts things in bags and moves them from place to place; carries sand in bucket and takes playdough to the home corner; pushes friends around in a toy pushchair Provide wheelbarrows to move sand; give items that can be moved and provide bags, baskets, containers, trolleys and pushchairs; take on picnics, go on trips or watch trains and buses transporting people, play travelling games with lined up chairs or boxes for going on a bus/train; sing ‘Down at the station’ or ‘The wheels on the bus’; read ‘Whatever next’, etc. Hides under blankets, bath robes, scarves, material, in boxes or dens; loves wearing hats; may cover their face with flannel when washing; wraps things up, paints over pictures; sits in a sand tray and covers their legs with sand; folds a picture and then wraps in more layers of paper Model and provide resources for wrapping presents, practicing wrapping things around with ribbons or tape or putting letters into envelopes; provide playdough to wrap around/hide toys in; sing ‘Wind the bobbin up’ demonstrating actions with materials; have dressing up clothes, hats and scarves available for putting layers on; have shredded paper; play pass the parcel, ‘hide and seek’ and ‘peek -a-boo games’; make houses with roofs; model words such as ‘hiding’ or ‘disappear’, etc. Drops things form high chair or cot; throws things; may gaze at your face; lines things up; climbs up and over; jumps off furniture; runs up and down; draws or paints lines; follows lines painted on the floor/ground; plays with running water in the bathroom; likes to go through tunnels; makes trails with glue; pushes cars or pushchairs in a straight line; knocks over structures built by other children; likes to wear clothes with stripes Provide balls of different sizes; build slopes and ramps to roll things down; provide target throwing opportunities; provide a variety of building bricks and other resources to build towers and knock them down; have available percussion instruments; provide opportunities to experience space and movement in/out, to move under, climb up, move across; play with ribbons waving them up/down or side to side; at mealtimes provide suitable things to drop down rather than food; begin to introduce language of ‘over/under’, fast/slow, high/low; provide leaves or feathers to watch them falling down, etc.

Schemas and the under 3 s Rotating (circles) Connecting Enclosing Containing Interested in wheels and cogs; likes twirling and twisting themselves, enjoys spinning round or being swung around; runs in circles; rolls down a hill, turns taps on and off, draws circles, likes to watch fans, washing machines and whisks in movement, reaches for round objects near them; likes to watch rolling balls Provide hoops and tyres to roll around, play parachute and circle games; provide toys which have moving parts to turn around, provide spinning tops, clocks, kaleidoscope and water wheels; roll with rolling pins; make windmills; use stickers for decoration; talk about shapes and spy the around; compare circles; sing ‘Round and round the garden’ with finger actions or ‘Wind the bobbin up’ with bobbin, etc. Joining and separating Gives and collects objects from adult; enjoys construction toys which involve joining things together; takes things apart, joins the table and chair by sticking tape across; ties a string to crates or bikes Provide a variety of construction toys, trains and train track; provide pegs, string and tape to connect things together; provide ribbons to weave in and out of resources; provide magnetic toys, pipes, tubes and guttering, locks and chains for exploration and to practice connecting, etc. Surrounding self, objects or space with a border Plays with farm animals and makes fences for them; builds enclosures with bricks and puts objects inside; puts cars in a garage, may draw a line around their picture; likes to sit inside a space such as basket or tyre; may surround themselves with cushions Provide peg boards to make borders or duplo boards for building houses: provide resources to make borders on paper and 3 -d; barrels and tunnels are good for hiding in as are den building materials and pieces of fabric, etc. Putting self or things inside other objects Posts things behind radiators or in bins; likes to put objects inside boxes, bags and pots, likes to climb into boxes and hide in the cupboards; plays in tents; loves to fill up buckets with sand; may put their thumb in and out of their mouth Play hide and seek games; provide opportunities for burying and digging objects out; provide shape sorting toys, provide a variety of containers, such as boxes and tins to put collections of items in, etc. Exploring things that turn, including self

Schemas and the under 3 s Positioning Dabbing Transforming Lies on the floor or under a table; may put things on their head; walks around the edge of a sandpit; prefers to have food items separated on a plate; enjoys lining up cars and threading beads/buttons; likes to stand at the front or back of a line Provide tyres, crates and boxes in different places and at different heights for children to position themselves or objects in; provide sweet and biscuit tins or wooden boxes and pegs for positioning around, make caterpillars or trains, etc. Random or specific marks Interested in making marks such as spots or eyes Look for patterns that contain dots and dabs; provide opportunities to spot with paint or dab pens; look at ladybirds, flower heads, eyes, etc. Exploring changes Likes to see, manipulate and explore changes with dry/wet materials; may add juice to their mashed potato; likes to mix sand water Provide a variety of malleable materials; let children mix paints, add colour to cornflour or water to clay; engage children in cooking activities; explain changes, etc. Placing objects or themselves in particular places

Knowledge of schemas and understanding schematic behaviour in young children can help practitioners to: understand why children are doing certain things describe children’s actions and behaviours in new ways support parents’ understanding of their children’s learning inform planning for children’s individual interests, preoccupations and abilities • be more effective in supporting children’s learning through thought extension and modelling of language, and the provision of enjoyable experiences • provide real and first-hand experiences for exploration and experimentation • enable repetition of opportunities • •

Language Development Chomsky Language Acquisition Device (LAD) • Chomsky's theory of Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is in contrast to Piaget’s theory in that he suggests that the knowledge of basic rules of language is by picking up on regularities and testing them out. • Each of these rules is part of the wider set of language rules connected to the child's specific culture through "surface structure" (order of words) and "deep structure" (meaning) (Smith et al. 2011). • Chomsky claims knowledge of language and its systems is innate and its structure culturally formed (Donaldson, 1978).

LAD model 1. Linguistic input feeds into… 2. LAD (Linguistic processing skills; Existing knowledge) which generates… 3. A theory of language (Phonology; Morphology; Semantics; Syntax) which determines… 4. Child’s grammatical competence (Comprehension of others’ speech; Speech production)

Language development - Goswami • • • Language aids conceptual development (Section 2 b), the development of a theory of mind (2 c), episodic memory development (3 a) and is the basis of working memory (3 b). Key role in Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive development. Infants then use the same abilities to acquire the phonological (sound-based) aspects of language that they use to acquire knowledge about the physical and psychological worlds, namely associative learning, tracking statistical dependencies, tracking conditional probabilities and making analogies. Word learning is aided by the universal tendency of adults (and children) to talk to babies using a special prosodic register called infant-directed speech (IDS) or ‘Motherese’. IDS uses higher pitch and exaggerated intonation (for example increased duration and stress) to highlight novel information, which appears perceptually effective in facilitating learning (for example Fernald and Mazzie 1991). Children who are less sensitive to the auditory cues of the prosodic and rhythmic patterning in language may be at risk for developmental dyslexia and specific language impairment (for example Corriveau et al. 2007). Active production is also important for language acquisition, and babbling reflects early production of the structured rhythmic and temporal patterns of language. Deaf babies do not show typical vocal babble, however babies born to signing deaf parents will ‘sign babble’ with their hands, duplicating the rhythmic timing and stress patterning of hand shapes in natural sign languages (Pettito et al. 2004).

Continued…. Vocabulary development • The primary function of language is communication, and words are part of meaning-making experiences from very early in development. • Conceptual representations precede language development, being rooted in the perceptual experience of objects and events. Nevertheless, carers talk to babies before they can talk back, naming objects that are being attended to, commenting on joint activities or discussing the child’s behaviour or apparent feelings. • One study showed that toddlers hear an estimated 5000 – 7000 utterances a day, with around a third of these utterances being questions (Cameron- Faulkner et al. 2003). • In a U. S. study, Hart and Risley (1995) estimated that children from high socio-economic status (SES) families heard around 487 utterances per hour, compared to 178 utterances per hour for children from families on welfare. • Hence by the time they were aged 4 years, the high SES children had been exposed to around 44 million utterances, compared to 12 million utterances for the lower SES children. • Word learning is also important for cognitive development because it is symbolic. Words are symbols because they refer to an object or to an event, but they are not the object or the event itself. Symbols allow children to disconnect themselves from the immediate situation. • Gestures are also symbolic (for example waving ‘goodbye’). Gesture precedes language production in development, providing a ‘cognitive bridge’ between comprehension and production (Volterra and Erting 1990). Action is used to express meaning. Even later in

Language rich environment 3. 4 Create a literary rich environment and successfully identify and plan phonological opportunities for learning and development • Each age phase • Implications for practice • Activity – Discuss what a language rich environment looks like across the age phases? • Ideas for improving the environment?

Practice to promote language skills More Than Baby Talk by Nicole Gardner-Neble & Kathleen Cranley Gallagher (2013 ) Practice Description 1. Get Chatty Engaging in conversations with children 2. Be a Commentator Giving descriptions of objects, activities or events 3. Mix It Up Using different types of words and grammar 4. Label It Providing children with the names of objects or actions 5. Tune In Engaging in activities or objects that interest children 6. Read Interactively Using books to engage children’s participation 7. Read It Again & Again! Reading books multiple times 8. Props, Please! Introducing objects that spark conversations 9. Make Music Engaging in musical activities 10. Sign It Using gestures or simple signs with words

Heuristic Play Heuristic play describes the activity of babies and children as they play with and explore the properties of ‘objects’. These ‘objects are things from the real world. Elinor Goldschmeid

Group Learning

Development Matters

Development Matters

Areas and Age Ranges

To Finish • Leadership log • Review your setting plan • Pre Task – CPLD Day 2 – effective practice with the 0 -20 month age range