What a fantastic opportunity for early years practitioners to demonstrate how a rich learning environment can be hugely effective in helping young children to develop reading, writing and numeracy skills.
Communicating is absolutely the most important thing we can do to encourage a young child's language development. However, we must also provide lots of opportunities through play for young children to explore language - using silly words, making up stories involving the children in the group, singing, rhyming and generally having fun, all helps children to develop a sense of language. We are fortunate enough to be working with children at that very special time of their development when they are just discovering their amazing abilities. I sometimes wonder if any of us really understand what a privileged position we are in.
At LEYF we meet children and families from an incredible variety of backgrounds. Many have English as a second language, many are from difficult home situations, but all are united in wanting to communicate with each other, with their peer groups and with the teams that care for them in nursery. They are also united in wanting to communicate in English and our over-riding purpose in providing a language-rich environment has to be to provide the means by which the young children in our care will acquire English language. Reading the recent Ofsted report Removing Barriers to Literacy, I am pleased at the recognition of the importance the early years has in supporting the development of literacy skills, which will remain for each child a touchstone to success in all walks of life.
It starts with the youngest child all the way up to our grandparent stay-and-play sessions in nursery, bringing together people from all ages and celebrating our wonderful diverse society. We all have a duty of care to every child we come into contact with and I look forward to involving all our partners, parents, carers and professionals in our 'year of communication'.