So I would like to welcome you all to the launch of the Brighter Beginnings Connect and Communicate Toolkit.

We're excited to have you with us and to be able to share this new resource with you.

My name is Elise and I'm in the Health and Development Checks team at the Department of Education.

I'm a speech pathologist by background, so I'm particularly excited to be bringing the Connect and Communicate Toolkit to you today.

I would like to start this webinar by acknowledging the various Aboriginal lands that we're all joining from today.

I'm joining from the lands of the Darug people and I'd like to pay my respect to the Elders past and present.

I'd like to extend that respect to the Elders of the many unseeded lands that you are joining from today and to all Aboriginal people joining us on the call.

I'd also like to acknowledge the many Aboriginal colleagues who have generously shared their wisdom, guidance and experience with us as we have built the Connect and Communicate Toolkit.

We are grateful to be the recipient of many generations of knowledge about children's development and language.

Today's webinar will cover key information about the Brighter Beginnings Connect and Communicate Toolkit.

I will take you through what the toolkit is.

My colleague Charlie, who is an early childhood educator, will explain the links to key frameworks.

Discuss how you and your service can become a Connect and Communicate champion.

Doctor Kate Short, who is a Senior Speech Pathologist and Senior Lecturer, will show you some practical strategies that can be embedded into everyday activities.

Some housekeeping.

As we kick off for today, the chat function has been disabled.

However, the Q&A function is happening today, so please place any questions or comments into the Q&A function.

The Health and Development Checks (HDC) team is ready to answer your questions throughout the webinar today.

We're here today as part of the Health and Development Checks for four year olds in Early Childhood Education and Care Services program.

You'll hear me refer to us today as HDC.

HDC in ECEC program builds on existing services where parents and carers can access their child's Health and Development Checks, such as their local doctor or child and family health nurse or their local Aboriginal Medical Service.

We know many children in NSW are not getting their four year old Health and Development Check.

About two in five children are also starting school developmentally off track.

Increasing the number of children who complete the four year old Health and Development Check can help families access information they need to support their child's health, growth and development and to seek help when needed before their child starts school.

So what is the Brighter Beginnings Connect and Communicate toolkit?

We are really excited to finally release this toolkit for everybody to be able to explore and use.

The Brighter Beginnings Connect and Communicate Toolkit is a resource to support educators to improve the communication skills of four year old children.

The The toolkit has been developed by teachers for teachers with the with input from experienced expert speech pathologists.

It has been designed to easily integrate into current practice experiences and routines that you are already doing every day.

I want to take a moment to acknowledge everyone who has contributed to the to the development of the toolkit.

I thank the many teams across the Department of Education who have shared their expertise, in particular Aboriginal Early Childhood Outcomes, Pedagogy and Practice and Communication and Engagement.

I'd also like to thank the many NSW Health speech pathologists and the Department of Customer Service who have provided input into the content of the toolkit.

A massive thank you as well to the educators on the ground who have given us valuable feedback which has shaped the final resource.

The toolkit draws together a wide range of knowledge and experiences and we extend our thanks to all who have shared their time and resources with us.

The Connect and Communicate Toolkit is online as of today.

The team will add the link to the Q&A now so that you can go and have a look and explore it.

On the website you'll find the Connect and Communicate Toolkit and the Reflective Workbook.

There are also links within the website.

One will take you to the videos and one will take you to the resources that have been included as part of the toolkit.

We'll take you through now some of the inclusions and give you a crash course on how to navigate the resource.

After the webinar today, I encourage you to familiarise yourself with the toolkit and the resources that are a part of it.

So why did we develop a toolkit to support communication development?

We know that communication is essential for a successful transition to school and for lifelong learning.

We also know that the interactions a child has with an educator are a strong predictor of academic success.

The AEDC results tell us that only % of NSW children are developmentally on track in the communication skills and general knowledge domain.

The HDC program has also found that speech and language development is one of the most common areas where children are requiring additional support following their check.

Children facing communication difficulties in early childhood are more likely to have ongoing challenges with tasks such as reading, writing and spelling, as well as challenges with behaviour and maintaining relationships.

Early detection and intervention are key to reducing the impact of these difficulties.

However, we know that wait lists are lengthy and families often face barriers in accessing follow up care.

While this toolkit provides strategies for all children, it may also be useful in providing teachers and educators with tools to support children's communication development while they await further assessment and follow up.

Communication includes the ways we communicate, what information or needs we communicate, and the reasons why we communicate.

It's about how we share and make meaning with others using information, messages, and what you can see and hear.

The Early Years Learning Framework tells us that children's attempts to communicate with others and the world around them begins from birth.

This includes many forms of communication, such as sounds and speech, gestures and body language, and both expressive and receptive language to express our own thoughts and to understand those of others.

The toolkit shares information, strategies and experiences over six key topic areas.

In topic one, we explore what we mean by communication and what communication looks like for children at four years of age.

This topic is an introduction to the toolkit and how we define communication.

This topic also provides information on Aboriginal English and children who are multilingual.

In topic two we explore responsive interactions.

We look at what this means, what it looks like in practice and how we can make sure our interactions with children support them becoming effective communicators.

In topic three, we look at creating learning environments to support communication development.

We look at set ups and activities in the indoor and outdoor environment that can enable children to communicate with teachers and each other.

We also explore how we can target communication development during routine times like meals and transitions and how visuals can further support communication.

Topic explores play based phonological awareness, so looking at letters and speech sounds and how words can be broken down into smaller parts.

Topic looks at concepts of print.

This refers to initial understandings about written text, graphics and books and supports children to develop a basic understanding of text before learning to read.

In Topic we do an in depth exploration of shared book reading that makes use of all the strategies that we cover in the previous topics.

We've designed the toolkit to be able to support what teachers and educators are doing on the floor everyday.

The toolkit includes guidance for developing communication through everyday environments and interactions.

When we talk about, for example, responsive interactions, it's not just the theory but practical strategies and prompts that you can try throughout different points of the day.

Pre written experience plans with accompanying resources are also included, saving time on and off the floor.

Ideas for team meetings and group reflections have been prepared for each topic.

These ideas support the strategies to be used throughout the service, including in the training and mentoring of team members.

The tool kit includes prompts for embedding Aboriginal perspectives.

We are committed to cultural safety and respecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ways of knowing, being and doing.

We have included prompts and ideas on how learnings link to Aboriginal pedagogies and how you might differentiate experiences to further embed these and personalise them to your service context.

We've also included prompts and ideas for differentiating activities depending on children's cultural context, capabilities and interests.

I'm going to run you through what's included in each topic of the toolkit.

We've used topic as an example.

Each topic has mirrors the same format.

Each topic includes a theory section providing you with relevant information and evidence based strategies.

The strategies are followed by a practical section with detailed experiences to put the strategies into practise.

It provides links to the Early Years Learning Framework, Aboriginal pedagogies and relevant early childhood theorists to help guide your planning and documentation.

The toolkit has been designed to be used across the year with short bite sized pieces of information and strategies to engage with each week.

The structure of the toolkit has been set up as a guide.

You can move faster or slower, or can choose topics that are relevant to your classroom.

You can start using the strategies straight away.

You don't need to complete the whole toolkit before starting To put new learnings into practice. With the Department of Customer Service, we've prepared short, simple family fact sheets.

Each one summarises a single topic.

They can be used to support families to continue the focus of the classroom at home.

Family fact sheets may be handed out as written or elements popped into newsletters or regular updates.

We want this to be something that is helpful for you.

Picture cards, visual routine templates, posters and game ideas are included.

This means you can pick up the experiences and implement them straight away without needing to source your own materials.

Posters might be a helpful way of prompting you and your teams to remember to use what you were learning.

A reflective workbook is a key part of the toolkit.

It's been designed with activities for individual, peer and group reflection.

We'll talk more about the Reflective Workbook in a moment.

I'm just going to add one more in here.

Thanks Hannah.

Videos are also included as part of the toolkit.

Southwestern Sydney Local Health District has prepared the videos.

They demonstrate strategies and practise and can be used to support understanding and to reflect on individual practise in the Reflective Workbook.

I'm going to hand over to Charlie now, who's been absolutely instrumental in the development of the toolkit, to discuss how the toolkit links to key frameworks and documentation.

Thank you, Elise.

Hi everyone, my name is Charlie.

I'm part of the Health and Development Checks team.

As Elise mentioned, I'm also an early childhood teacher and I've tried to use that experience in developing the toolkit, so I'll get right into it.

Engagement with the toolkit may also assist your service in preparing key documentation.

So we understand that services have a lot of documentation and reporting requirements, so the toolkit has been designed to support you fulfilling those requirements rather than just being an extra task for you to complete.

So each section contains clear links to the EYLF principles, practises and learning outcomes, as well as early childhood developmental theorists, and that can be used to inform your planning for and documentation of children's learning.

So it's information you can pull out and put straight onto your planning wall or curriculum.

The toolkit will also help you complete your quality improvement plan, your QIP by supporting goal setting against the National Quality Standards and .

Completing the Reflective Workbook, which we will talk more about on the next slide, can provide evidence of critical reflection.

And finally, if your service is receiving support through the Inclusion Support Programme, you may also use the toolkit when preparing your strategic inclusion plan by using the information provided to inform decision making on strategies and actions for improving and embedding inclusive practice to support all children.

All right, so I'll now introduce you to the Reflective Workbook and explain how individuals and services can become a Connect and Communicate champion.

So the Reflective Workbook includes a variety of reflective questions and activities to complete as you go through the toolkit to further embed learning and reflect on your own practise.

The workbook has been developed as a Word document.

You may choose to print this out to complete it, or you can save it to your computer and come back to it as you progress through the toolkit.

The workbook includes reflective questionnaires.

These can be completed by yourself or by a peer observing you.

These may guide you in examining your learning environments and your interactions with children.

You can use these to track your learning progress.

Also included are our experience plans.

So these are based on the pre written plans that are already included in the toolkit.

And these planning templates will guide you to use your knowledge of the children in your classroom to tailor the experiences to them and then to evaluate how it went.

The workbook also has opportunities for video analysis.

So this includes watching pre recorded videos of best practice and identifying strategies from the toolkit and also prompts to record and analyse your own practice.

You can also do voice recordings if the idea of recording yourself on video is a little bit too intimidating.

There's lots of opportunities throughout to gain valuable peer feedback.

So people like directors, educational leaders or room leaders might be the people that are best placed to provide this feedback and they can use these activities to develop an upskill

Team members, you know, if you've got trainees, if you've got students or other new staff in your service.

We recognise this is a significant commitment and we want to reward educators who are committed to capability uplift and supporting children's communication development.

So engaging with the workbook may support you towards your NESSA accreditation.

The Toolkit aligns with Standards and of the Australian Professional Standards for teachers, knowing the content and how to teach it and planning for and implementing effective teaching and learning.

So completing the required sections of the workbook can be logged as hours of professional learning.

Fully completing the workbook can be logged as up to hours upon completion of at least the required sections of the workbook, and these are notated in the workbook so you'll be able to identify which activities are required and which ones are not,

You'll be invited to send our team a copy of the final activity, which includes your final reflections on all the content and learning and a declaration that you have completed the relevant activities.

This will not be assessed or graded.

Once we have reviewed it, we will send through Connect and Communicate Champion certificates, one for the individual that has completed the workbook and one for the whole service.

These may be displayed as you see fit to showcase your commitment to supporting children's communication development and ongoing professional learning.

Now I'm going to head back to Elise.

Thanks, Charlie, to explore just a few of the strategies that we've highlighted in the toolkit.

There are many more than what we're discussing with you today.

These are just more of a sneak peek.

To take us through them, I'd like to introduce you to Doctor Kate Short.

Kate is a senior speech pathologist in South Western Sydney Local Health District and a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney.

Kate is our clinical lead and has overseen the speech pathology element of the toolkit.

We are grateful to have had Kate on board with us and appreciate her time this afternoon.

Information on the strategies will be on the slide, but if you do want to start exploring in the toolkit, Kate will also give you the relevant page numbers as she walks you through it.

Thanks, Kate.

I also want to say it's been a pleasure to be involved in this project.

It's been amazing to work with such a fantastic team and to see the commitments of both Department of Education and Department of Health to children's communication development like this.

It's very exciting time.

So I want you to think about children, and I want you to think about being in an early childhood classroom.

And you're sitting down to read a book with three kids and you're distracted.

It's a busy day.

Jeremy's walking towards you with a paintbrush and it's got paint on it.

There's a truck that's zooming towards you.

And Ali taps you and says, can we start now?

And you respond, yes, great.

What do you think this book will be about now?

Ali is an assertive communicator and he makes it really easy for you to respond to him.

We know your responsiveness to his initiation, his question, and his tapping of you, and that's his initiation.

We know that's the basis for great learning of communication and it's a basis for great relationship with you.

His brain at that point is really open to learn when he does that initiation.

We also know that not all kids are like Ali, and they're not quite as clear in their initiations.

They're not always that quick as well.

And so for great communication to development, we really want to be able to respond to as many of those initiations as we can.

So absolutely fundamental piece in the toolkit is having responsive interactions, watching and listening really closely for those initiations and responding to them is absolutely crucial.

And this is the bedrock of this toolkit.

These, the interactions you have, these responsive interactions underpin all of the strategies in the toolkit, the experiences and all the learnings in the toolkit.

If you do nothing else, we ask that you complete this topic.

Topic #the skills in here are absolutely vital to communication success for children of all communication abilities, whether they talk or not.

So responsive interactions are in topic and they start on page if you're having a look.

Responsive interactions support really meaningful relationships between the educators and children, in fact between all adults and children.

Responsive interactions involve recognising and understanding and then responding to each individual child's individual cues.

And each child does do those differently.

Some do it with words, many do it with words, some do them with complete sentences, some do them with not quite so complete sentences.

Some do it with their hands, some do it with their eyes and some kids do it with their bodies.

Some kids do it with their behaviours, so you individually knowing your children mean that you tailor those individual initiations and respond back to them.

Being responsive means that you really do tailor to the individual needs and strengths of each child and extend their learning in your responses through the way that you answer them, through the way you ask another question, through the way you give feedback, or through the way that you scaffold them.

So let's think about a method or a way that we can help you to think around that.

So one way to engage in responsive interactions on the way that we've termed it in the toolkit is called serve and return.

We want you to think about interactions a bit like a tennis game.

It's on.

This is on page of your toolkit.

If we think about conversation like a bit of a tennis rally where the adult and child are equal partners and you're responding to each other's cues, we want that rally to go as long as possible.

Absolutely crucial to the rally is the serve, and the serve hopefully comes from the child.

It might be a small, quick eye contact to you.

It might be a tap on your shoulder.

It might be a point, it might be a question, but if those serves are really important and how this child is expressing themselves to you or drawing you into their world, how you return the return of that.

So that's the child throwing the ball.

And then you return that serve with your response.

So you notice those serves like we've got in Step here.

And then you return that serve by supporting and encouraging the child.

You might use verbal or non verbal responses.

You might use your facial expression in gestures and words.

You might extend what they say.

You might clarify some things that they've said, or you might ask another question because you're not quite sure what they want of you, but you reserve warmly and quickly to them.

You might.

And then after you've done that, you want to give a name to something you're doing.

So you'll name the thing you're talking about, or you'll name the action that you're doing.

You might name how they're feeling.

They might be crying, and so you're naming you're sad.

And that supports them learning the name of the words.

As I said, when they start, their brain is open to learn and now they're really ready to hear that word or that sentence or the things that you're saying at that point.

We then once you've named it or said something about it, we're looking for it to happen again.

So our job at this point is wait, look for another serve, look and wait for them to keep it going.

Look for any small thing that says, yes, I'm still in this game with you so that you can send the ball back again.

If you can do that back and forth, we know that the research is really clear.

The longer you go back and forth, the better it is for their communication development.

We know that them starting is the most powerful thing.

So us waiting and waiting and watching closely for that serve will be absolutely key.

And then us goes back and forth.

Then we can't they don't go for very long.

These these back and forth rallies might go for seconds, they might go for seconds.

If they go for like minutes, that is really high quality.

So then the child, we've got to practise the beginnings and ends.

They will end and the child will be done.

You might add to that some emotion like oh I really liked that, oh that was fun.

High

You might mark the ending by doing something like that, or you might push them.

You might then say be ready for them to come back to you again.

So you let them go.

Don't force them to stay, but you'll be there and ready for when that initiation comes back again, when they're ready to serve back to you again.

We want to follow that child's lead.

We know that the longer these interactions go, the better it will be for them.

Something to consider here is to think about the turns being equal.

We want those rallies to have as much of you as much as and as much of the child.

Sometimes that requires us to pause and wait.

We'll make sure that we respond really quickly so that they stay with us.

Depending upon the nature of the child, if they said a sentence, you might want to extend it a little bit and say it a bit longer.

You might want to add a word in, we don't want the adult, We don't want you to end up with more ball time than the child.

We want to have as much equal time in that serve and return time as you can.

Hopefully serve and return is a great way for you to think about how can I get an interaction going and how or how can I respond to a child and get it, get an interaction going and keeping it going for as long as possible.

That's the fundamental and all of the other strategies are built on those responsibilities of interactions, as is the ELYF.

Then we're gonna think about the next thing.

We're looking at language rich learning environments.

These strategies are from topic in the toolkit.

So creating a learning environment that will support kids communication development.

It's on page if you're having a look.

Your physical spaces have the potential to really impact on each child's learning, so a rich learning environment to support communication development should include lots of careful consideration of how the learning spaces are organised to include agency.

This includes laying out the room and what is included with it and really being very intentional about that.

So there's some really good things to consider having clearly defined learning spaces with different areas labelled.

They might be labelled with symbols, they might be labelled with pictures or they might have text.

So it's not just your words that let them know that that's where those places are and that they have very clear boundaries between spaces.

So kids know where they are and they can trust them and and go to them and know where they're going and what will happen there.

Really important is having quiet spaces for around time and you will use them, and I'm sure you do in many different ways.

Having engaging displays and making sure that the childrens own artwork is displayed.

Not just pretty artwork that somebody else has done, but it is labelled.

It has their names on them so they can see their name and you have opportunities in those to reference their name and to see the sounds and the letters.

But also in the artworks you have places where they might initiate and then you can respond and build vocabulary and build a longer term serve and return interaction.

You might even write descriptions with some more complex and more complex words on them.

It might say it's beautiful, a nice longer word that is really good for sound development to be trying for a child to be trying to say that.

Also, as a little hint for you, anything that you put on the walls probably helps you to remember to say it as well.

Really important is good lighting and manageable background noise, which I know is really hard in an early childhood centre, but it is very important for children and adults so they can see and hear clearly.

If you work with a community that has the way, there's children who have lots of hearing difficulties because of otitis media or other reasons.

Hearing and being able to have these spaces where children can hear clearly and see you clearly is absolutely crucial and will lead to better back and forth interactions.

So another part of creating a language environment, rich language environment is selecting resources that give the children an opportunity to comment and to express ideas, being intentional about those resources that they link with other things you are doing through the day.

So the words that they hear, they hear a number of times, but it also means that they can, there's a range of things we can do to really support the communication in this way.

We can provide engagement with books, but we don't just want stories, we want fiction and non fiction because different kids like different stuff and it forces you.

It doesn't force you, but it encourages you to use different words and different sentences with different kinds of books.

Using children's home languages is crucial.

And so being able to have books and, and, and activities and things in your environments that represent those home cultures and languages are really, really important.

And they will spark those moments of back and forth interaction if the kid can align to those things and see those things.

Obviously, our parents are key in helping us to have things that are representative of the kids cultures and their languages.

Then you also need to make sure there are areas for literacy and language experiences.

And I think everywhere in an early childhood setting is that. We've mentioned books, but it's of course not just about books.

It's also including opportunities for writing and for drawing and being able to distinguish between writing and drawing. Areas for music, because we know music is so crucial and so linked with communication development.

And for some children is such an access in to great communication development and then dramatic storytelling.

We know there are cultures that storytelling is the way of learning and it's the way of imparting information and storytelling is a really key part.

That's a really hard thing to do.

So places for that dramatic storytelling, both of you modelling it also have the opportunity for children to do it.

Having the resources that support communication through the classroom is definitely not limited to specific areas.

Every area in your in your early childhood setting, including the bathrooms, everywhere is an opportunity for communication to happen.

Something else that's really important is including opportunities in outdoor play.

Lots of the little gorgeous kids, I see, love outdoor play and their strengths are so obvious in outdoor play.

This is where their mind and their body are happy.

And so this is where they're more likely to have some of those back and forth interactions with you and where you might get longer ones happening, where they're feeling joyful and where they're feeling inspired and their body is feeling good.

All of the strategies that we've talked about will be really relevant in outdoor play.

So outdoor is a really important place for communication development.

So there, but there are some unique opportunities outdoor setting up those outdoor spaces intentionally so that you things that you've been talking about inside might happen outside or that there will be opportunities that can happen there that wouldn't happen anywhere else.

And so looking for opportunities that will extend their knowledge.

If you've been reading a book and it's been about the beach, and then when you're at the sand pit, you've suddenly got you've got beach balls or things like that, that are in the sand pit today.

So that you can the words that have come up in your book and now starting to come up in the outdoor play and you can extend now the child might say them because they've heard them in the book.

So being really intentional in that outdoor play setup is absolutely crucial.

Looking for opportunities to extend their knowledge and explore what children might be curious about in the outdoors.

Little things that are peaking and hiding that haven't been there, usually, plants or animals or things about the weather will be really important.

Embracing new words and experiences and thinking about the unique vocabulary opportunity that you will find in your outdoor environment will be crucial.

For some kids, this is where the learning will be best.

Deliberately connecting with country is absolutely crucial to that and often web kids will learn better.

So learning about your local landscape and sharing that learning with the children, having community members that come in and talk about the landscape and having learning opportunities deliberately happening outside.

If that is happening, we're more like, if connection to country is part,

We know that children are more likely to develop well and maybe hang on to those words and and learning those sentences.

So outdoor is really important, but we also want to think about some of the techniques in your response.

So we're going to move on thinking about responsive interactions more so with the rich in the rich learning environments.

Moving on to page if you're looking at your workbook.

So the role of the educator or teacher in the outdoors, whoever is there, may be considered equally important as that role indoors.

We want you to have a having a positive attitude, responsiveness and enjoying that outdoor space is really important for that effective child led learning.

We want those interactions to occur and be back and forth with the adults and the peers.

That if you are monitoring out to play and the kids are free and playing, that when those initiations come, the serves come to you.

You're down at their level and responding and taking that moment to have that one or two-minute interaction that goes back and forth.

That learning adds up over time and will be absolutely crucial.

The child will go off and play again with the mates and then the group of them might come back and again, that opportunity to do the back and forth is absolutely crucial.

You sitting down in the sand pit rather than standing up above if you can, so that you're at the level of the child children so that that back and forth can happen.

Asking questions, really good questions that can promote language use will be absolutely important.

Being able to understand and respond to questions allows children to interact with you and with others.

And actually it means that we can often have a group experience and kids model answers and then a child might see three other children answer the same question and that's giving them examples of how they might do it too.

So questions are really important.

We can ask closed questions, whether children have one or two words or a yes or no response.

And that might be right for a child who's new to your centre or doesn't have much English.

If we want to have children speak more, we need to do more open-ended questions.

And you will graduate those as to being really complex about things that aren't happening here, but predicting what might happen.

Or they might be really concrete about the here and now about what's happening right here in front of us.

Children that have trouble with understanding will really do well with those really here and now concrete questions, but we need to keep asking them questions about what's happened before and what will happen next.

Those kinds of open-ended questions will really encourage children to think deeply and communicate in more detail.

You might model the answer to that and then give them another go at doing it as well.

So that asking questions and key questions, not just asking closed questions, but being opening those questions is and then really listening hard to those responses and building on those responses, we know is absolutely how children will learn to communicate best.

And that will prepare them for school because school requires a lot of that kind of thinking.

Self talk is a strategy we talk about in the toolkit, as is parallel talk.

Self talk is exactly what it says.

It's that you talk about what you're doing.

It's modelling, OK.

It's you showing what you would could say in this.

You might say, I'm putting my hat on before I'm going outside.

I'm putting my hat on.

We're going to go outside.

I'm putting my hat on before we go outside.

And sometimes in that self talk, you can hear what I just did.

I'll use a bit of stress, little bit of emphasis that really helps the kid focus in.

Or maybe the harder parts of that sentence.

Parallel talk is using words to describe not what I'm doing, but what the child is doing because you're doing it at the same time that they're doing it.

So you're really giving them words to go with the thing they are doing.

So if you're putting on sunscreen, you might say, oh, you're rubbing the sunscreen on with your hands, or we're rubbing it onto our arms, we're rubbing it on so we can go outside.

And that's a very complex sentence, exactly the kind of sentence that we're expecting them to say in kindergarten and in the last year of preschool.

So you're modelling those kinds of sentences to the kids, looking at them and sharing the joy often.

Then it means that they'll often respond to you as well, and they will hit the ball back to you in that interaction.

And I said sticky and you'll hit the ball back and go, yeah, it is sticky, but we need it on so we can go outside.

So you can model all of that talk.

The final strategy we've pulled from the toolkit today, and there's many more than these, is binary choice, and this is giving children a choice between two objects, pictures, words, or two actions of between two things.

Maybe you would say, would you like to go out to the sand pit or the obstacle course?

This encourages children to use appropriate vocab and can be really helpful for children who can be overwhelmed by lots of options or who don't have a lot of vocabulary if they're new language learners.

You might even pair that with some visuals that you've got and there's a whole chapter about visuals and how you can use those to help in that circumstance as well.

We're gonna move on to the next one.

Sorry, I just mucked something up.

Here we go.

So then we're going to think about another part of our toolkit moving on in through the road map of all the different areas we cover.

Another is concepts of print.

So I'm jumping around a bit, but this is topic five in the toolkit, and it's called Concepts of Print and it's can be found on page

When we talk about concepts of print, we're talking about children's understanding of written text, graphics and books and how they work to communicate meaning and link to spoken language.

We're developing a base.

They're developing a basic understanding of concepts of print supports children before they learn to read.

One part of concepts of print is understanding the difference between letters, words and sentences.

Knowing a collection of letters and sounds make a word, and the collection of words makes a sentence.

It's a really important step in understanding the structure of spoken language and this assists in making connections between spoken and written words.

When looking at written text, this can also include like identifying how spaces separate words, upper and lowercase letters, or some punctuation like question marks.

The experience in this toolkit provides a starting point to explore these skills with preschool age children.

We're not expecting them to master these skills before they transition to school, we're starting to expose them to these ideas.

Concepts of Print also involves understanding environmental print and graphics.

Our everyday environments contain many symbols and pictures which convey meaning in our quick and efficient ways.

Identifying print within the environment, like stop signs and posters and logos, they all recognise the McDonald's logo or the Minecraft logo.

What's going to be and that can increase awareness of print concepts and support children to understand how pictures convey meaning.

We will use that for children who have a, who to help their and support their understanding and to support their development in completing routines in their classroom as well.

Another aspect of concepts of print is developing a knowledge of book orientation and organisation, so understanding how books work and how we interact with them.

This includes being able to identify the different parts of the book and how.

We're going to see some examples of how you might do that on the next few slides.

It includes directionality and in English, understanding how books and the text within those books are read from left to right and top to bottom.

But in Arabic, and hopefully you've got an Arabic book, it goes in a different direction so that kids can start to understand that with different languages doing it in different ways.

So here's an example now of a poster that's included in parts of the book.

And we have some of these that you can stick around around your centre.

This poster provides prompts on how to explore parts of a book with children.

And this can help you and the staff to remember what you can talk about and what you could highlight.

You might want to print it out and put it on display.

When sharing a book with children, you might want to start with the book orientation, top or the bottom of the book or the front or back cover.

And we're going to have a look at a quick video in a minute to see somebody doing that.

You might want to draw attention, encourage them to label the different parts, find the beginning, find the end, which are really important and great concepts to have for starting kindergarten and for preschool.

We're looking at the front cover.

You might want to talk about the title or the author.

You might want to talk about the illustrator and the pictures.

And you can encourage the children to understand that, help the children to understand the different ways text and images communicate meaning.

You could also look at the back and there's a blurb on the back and you might want to talk about that.

So now we're going to have a look at a video.

This is one of the many video examples that are included in the toolkit of the different strategies.

In this video, we look at teaching concepts of print through exploring parts of a book during our story time.

You'll see some examples of some of the strategies that I just talked about on the previous slide if you want to.

We are going to read this story today.

This is the front cover and this is the back cover.

Where do I read first? the front! the front cover!

Yes, I start at the front cover and I'm looking - no, the back cover - The back cover is the end of the story.

That's the last page, but we need to start at the first page, which is the front cover.

And I'm looking for the name of the book.

It's a word.

Can anyone see any words? - L-l-library

I'm looking for the title.

Here it is.

These are some words.

These words say Thelma, the Unicorn.

Those are the words.

And look, here's a picture.

We can look at the picture.

What picture is that? - A silly doggy

And there's another picture of a dog.

And look at this picture.

It's a picture of a Unicorn. - It's so silly

Let's read our story.

Oh, Are there any pictures on this page to look at?

No. No. A big!

Oh, look, I found the title again.

That's the name of our story. - Carrot

Is this a picture or is it words that we can read?

Words. Pictures. Yes.

This is a picture that we can look at, and it's a picture of carrots.

Here are the words Thelma the Unicorn.

This is Thelma.

Where do I read?

I don't know where the words are.

This is our story.

This is the picture.

But here are the words.

This is what I can read.

It's our story.

Let's listen.

Oh, this picture is covered.

We can't see it.

Uh-oh. Oh no, we will need to read the words.

These are the words.

And hmm we start reading over here on the left.

We start here at the top, and we go this way.

Are you ready to listen? Maybe read from the back maybe

Let's have a read.

Those were included so that we can show you, I guess, an element of what we've included in the toolkit.

So I think I mentioned earlier, there are videos that we've included, are distinct, are the same, is a repetition with some labels and things.

But for using the responsive in the reflective workbook, I should say.

So we're really excited for you to go on and explore that part of the toolkit website and start to have a look and use the videos as you see useful to your practice and within your teams.

Thanks, Hannah, for bringing those slides back up.

So thank you again for being with us today.

That does bring us to the end of our content for today.

We thank you for your attention as we share the Connect and Communicate resource with you.

If you haven't yet had a chance to access the resource, the team will once again place the link in the Q&A.

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If you do have any questions, please contact us using the e-mail address on the screen.

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If you've got thoughts on areas to improve, we are always happy to hear them, so please don't hesitate to get in touch. Before you go this afternoon,

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Thank you.