Encourage and respond to children's signs of interest, and extend these through questions, discussions and further investigation.
Give additional support to children who are learning English as an additional language, through pictorial support, or from familiar adults who can interpret for them.
Continue to suggest different ways of using and combining toys and materials.
Use daily events and special treats, such as walking the dog or a birthday party, as the starting point for your shared play. This will help children act out and understand what they have experienced.
Use hide and seek or hunt the thimble games to build on children's curiosity, interest and anticipation of what might happen next.
When you are walking outside, ask children to look for particular people or objects. "Who can find… ?" games encourage children to explore the environment and to look out for special things.
Observe which are the children's favourite songs and rhymes and continue to use these, changing words around and inserting nonsense words.
Encourage finger rhymes and songs that include counting, for example 'One Potato, Two Potato, Three Potato, Four'.
Designing and Making
Introduce children to appropriate tools for different materials.
Provide a range of construction materials, including construction kits containing a variety of shapes, sizes and ways of joining, and support children in their use.
ICT
Draw young children's attention to pieces of ICT apparatus they see or that they use with adult supervision.
Time
Talk about and show interest in children's lives and experiences.
Use, and encourage children to use, the language of time in conversations, for example, 'past', 'now' and 'then'.
Encourage discussion of important events in the lives of people children know, such as their family.
Make books of events in settings, for example, summer fair, building a climbing frame, shopping expedition or learning about a festival.
Encourage role-play of events in children's lives.
Observe changes in the environment, for example, through the seasons or as a building extension is completed.
Place
Arouse awareness of features of the environment in the setting and immediate local area, for example, make visits to shops or a park.
Introduce vocabulary to enable children to talk about their observations and to ask questions.
Encourage parents to provide vocabulary in their home language to support language development and reinforce understanding.
Pirates's treasure - In a pre-school, a practitioner offers resources, questions and ideas to a child exploring 'pirates'.
[transcript]
You can watch the video via modem or slow / fast / superfast broadband connections. If you are behind a network firewall, why not click here to view a flash file of the video. You do need to have the flash plugin.
Communities
Introduce language that describes emotions, for example, 'sad', 'happy', 'angry' and 'lonely', in conversations when children express their feelings about special events.
Use group times to share events in children's lives.
Listen carefully and ask questions that show respect for children's individual contributions.
Explain the significance of special events to children.
Visit workplaces and invite people who work in the community to talk to children about their roles. Wherever possible encourage the challenging of strereotypes by, for example, using a male midwife or a female firefighter.
Acknowledgements
Disclaimer
00012-2007CDO-EN