Charlie Perterson Coombe

The Brighter Beginnings Connect and Communicate Toolkit is a resource designed by educators for educators to improve the communication skills of four year old children. There is no right or wrong way to use the tool kit. It's been broken into short weekly chunks. However, you may choose to move faster or slower than the suggested pace. Whatever works for you, your service and your cohort.

The toolkit work, it is really all about educators. It does not need to be completed with each kind of new cohort of children, but rather the goal is once you have learned an embedded the strategies into your teaching, you can put it away for awhile and then you know, potentially come back to it when you need a refresher. So you see up on the screen, there's an outline from the toolkit about the six key topics.

Alright, so let's go back into what's included in the toolkit. So will say this a lot, but the Connect and Communicate Toolkit has really been designed with the user experience in mind. We do encourage you to follow along in the toolkit as we go through it. So I believe that link has been put in the chat there. That'll take you to our website and then you'll be able to see the link to download a PDF of the toolkit.

So the toolkit contains information, strategies and experiences to support children's language development. I'm going to walk you through topic 2 to demonstrate what has been included . So please follow along from page 19 online or if anyone happens to have a physical copy you can look at page 23.

So at the beginning of each chapter there are links to the EYLF. This is then followed by research and evidence and links to relevant pedagogies.

So to support learning videos of different experiences are also included. These again are accessible through our website. There on the main page. There will be embedded links and QR codes throughout the online and physical copies of the tool kit. You can see this on page 21 of the online version or for a physical copy in Page 25.

If you're looking at page 21, you'll see immediately under that link to the video is a prompt to use the Reflective Workbook. So the Reflective Workbook is also available on our website. It's a key part of the toolkit that provides an opportunity to engage in critical reflection. This may be individually or through peer feedback. Completing the Reflective Workbook can also contribute to up to 16 hours of professional learning for NESA accreditation.

So flick over to page 25 or page 29 for a physical copy. You'll see a green box that directs you to the resources we've provided to support the experiences and strategies. These are all available via the QR code in the appendix section at the back of the toolkit. There also, again available on our main web page, the resources include picture cards, posters and templates that can all be printed off and some of them can be customised or used however is best for you in order to deliver the activities in the toolkit in your particular classroom context.

The pink strip you'll see immediately under that green box on page 25 or 29 indicates a tip or a hint. These tips and hints are included throughout the toolkit to make the experiences more inclusive. So for example, suggestions on how to incorporate Aboriginal teaching and culture into practise are found in these strips.

And then if we go a little bit further on page 27 online or 31 in the physical copy, you'll find a summary of that full topic with links to the NQF and tips for completing your quality improvement plan. The final feature I'll walk you through today is the family fact sheets. The one for topic 2 is found on page 36 online or page 40 physical. These can be printed out, copied into your newsletters and given to families to continue the learning at home. We also have these translated into nine additional languages and again, these versions could all be found on the main Toolkit web page.

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Yasmin McFarlane

Responsive interactions are central to all the experiences in the toolkit, and we recommend that you complete this topic before moving on to any of the others. Responsive interactions support meaningful relationships which are being built between educators and children. Responsive interactions involve recognising, understanding and responding to individual cues from the children.

Being responsive means tailoring interactions to the needs, strengths and interests of individual children and extending children's learning through questions, feedback and scaffolding.

The social interactions children experience are crucial to their language development, and children who experience quality, responsive interactions tend to have stronger language skills.

So, educators can model responsive interactions by placing themselves at the child's level, engaging in a relaxed and unhurried manner, responding to verbal and nonverbal cues, and being mindful of children's cultural traditions and languages and how these may affect the way children interact with others.

One way to engage in responsive interactions is through using the serve and return method, which is on page 22 online or page 26 of the Physical Toolkit. This is like a conversational tennis rally where both the adult and child are equal partners and respond to one another's cues. The serve may be verbal or nonverbal. It's however the child expresses themselves or draws attention. The return is how you respond to the child's serve.

To engage in responsive serve and return interactions, firstly, we notice the serve and share the child's focus or attention. So where are they looking? Are they pointing? Are they making a sound or facial expression? Secondly, we then return the serve by supporting and encouraging. So use verbal or nonverbal responses, including facial expressions, gestures and words. We then give it a name. Name anything, a person, a thing, an action or a feeling. This supports development of language connections in the brain and builds the child's vocabulary. We then take turns and wait. So keep the interaction going back and forth by giving the child time to respond and develop their own ideas, confidence and independence. Waiting can be hard, but don't feel pressured to fill the silence. Let the child take the lead. And then we practise endings and beginnings. The serve and return cycle ends when the child signals that they're done or ready to move to a new activity. We follow the child's lead.

So something to consider here. Try and keep the turns of your rally equal. So if a child is pointing at something, we can respond with a single word or a simple sentence. If they have said a sentence, you may like to use a slightly longer one, but we don't want the adults to end up with more ball time than the child.

We'll talk about a few ways to return the serve and respond to the interaction now, and there are more in your in the toolkit.

Focused stimulation is when we are focused on what we are aiming to teach at that moment. Repeating a word or phrase is key here. It also doesn't have to be the name of something. It could be an action word or a describing word, whatever the focus of the child is.

Expansion is when we take what the child has said or done and add something to it. We could, for example, add a new word, a sign or a phrase. Through this, we are responding to what they have said and we're also teaching the next steps in how to make that sentence tell us something more so more specific and as a result, less risk of communication breakdown or more grammatically correct.

The final one we've pulled out today, but not the final one in the toolkit, is recasting. Recasting is particularly useful to model the correct use of sentence structure and grammatical forms. It's also great for introducing new or more advanced vocabulary. Similarly to expansion, it helps to reduce the risk of communication breakdown.

So just to recap, we can do focused stimulation, which is name it and repeat. We can do expansion, which is adding new words, signs or phrases, and we can do recasting, which is modelling the correct structures, words and forms.

In topic 2, we also introduce LEaRN for the first time. You can find this on page 26 online or page 30 in the Physical Toolkit. The LEaRN technique helps children to develop their vocabulary. Vocabulary can be grouped into 3 levels of complexity. Words that are used every day. More complex words that are used across lots of settings but may need an explanation to understand their meaning. And then thirdly, words that are specific to a particular topic. Teaching in that middle tier or Tier 2 words can be a great way to increase the child's vocabulary.

So let's work through what is involved in LEaRN. So firstly it's look and listen for new words. So this could be in books, in child led experiences or conversations. Emphasise the word when talking or reading and talk about what it means in a child friendly way and then we repeat the word in different sentences in a variety of experiences. And lastly, we notice when children use the word and acknowledge this and give praise.

So we can run through an example of what this might look like. In the book 'We're going on a bear hunt,' many of you would be familiar with this text, so I've chosen the word 'swirling' as a tier two different word. I can then define it - so swirling is when something goes around and around and I might use my hands to show it. Then I consider different experiences, so swirling water and food colouring to mix them, swirling in dancing, swirling mixtures of outdoor materials, so leaves and flowers to make a mix. I could say you're swirling the water, your turn to swirl it and if the child says the word I can then say 'I love the way you used swirling to describe what the water is doing'.

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Lucy Nixon

Today we will focus on Chapter 3 of the Connect and Communicate Toolkit Tool Kit which is all about creating language rich learning environments using both a physical spaces you have available as well as daily routines to help build language. So physical spaces have the potential to greatly impact a child's learning. Well planned environments cater for different learning a capabilities and learning styles. They allow for reasonable adjustments where required. I'll take you through some considerations for both indoor and outdoor spaces and then we can spend some time discussing how we can best support language in the outdoor environment. So please follow me from page 40 online or page 46 in the physical toolkit. A rich learning environment to support communication development should include careful consideration of how the learning spaces are organised to include agency. Agency refers to a child's capacity to make choices and take actions that influence their life and environment.

Some things to consider in both the indoor and outdoor spaces are having clearly defined learning spaces, with different learning areas labelled with symbols, pictures and text, and the boundaries between them clearly marked. Having quiet spaces available for down time; engaging displays such as children's artwork that's been labelled with their names and descriptions; and good lighting and manageable background noise so children and adults can see and hear clearly.

Another part of creating language rich learning environments is selecting resources that give children the opportunity to comment and express ideas. To best support communication, consider promoting engagement with books, including fiction and nonfiction, using children's home languages and materials that reflect their cultures and experiences. Areas for literacy and language experiences. So we've mentioned books, but also you might like to include opportunities for writing and drawing, music and dramatic storytelling. And also having resources that support communication throughout the classroom, so not just limited to specific areas.

So I'll move through to outdoor spaces. There's a huge amount of opportunity for language learning in the outdoor spaces in your service. All the strategies in the toolkit can be applied both indoors and outdoors. The outdoors offers some unique language and experiences that build different vocabulary. So in planning for outdoor play you might like to consider what is the setup? Could there be a dramatic play or an art area? Do you have distinct areas that accommodate different learners? What are some topics that suit the outdoors? Could you discuss the weather or plants and animals? Is there an opportunity for you to connect with country? What do you know about the local landscape? Do you know local names for the plants in your space? Responsive serve and return interactions and the use of LEaRN in conjunction with thoughtful creation of play spaces can enhance the outdoor experience for both students and educators.

Moving on to daily routines and transitions. Another way that educators can create environments that support language learning is through the daily routine and transitions. The evidence is strong that children learn well in predictable environments and routine tasks present a good opportunity for vocabulary and language development. The toolkit provides information on how to make sure that all children understand the routine. Some children will learn it by doing it, and some may need more explicit direction. All children benefit from the use of clear communication and visuals when explaining something.

Today we're going to focus on how we build vocabulary during these routine times. This is on page 53 online and 59 in the toolkit. Self talk is using words to describe what you are doing while a child is watching. So for example, I'm choosing apple for morning tea. Parallel talk is using words to describe what a child is doing. So for example, are you choosing banana for morning tea? Or binary choice is giving a choice between two objects. For example, do you want apple or banana?

When it comes to snack talk, a really fun way to introduce new vocabulary into meal time routines is a snack talk game. So we've provided the resources you may need for this on our website and the resource includes a topic question with a number of pictures and choices. So for example, what is your favourite animal? Place the card on the table and introduce the topic. This is where we start to bring together some of the other strategies and learnings especially serve and return.

Notice the serve. Does the child seem engaged by a particular picture? Are they responding verbally or nonverbally? You can respond to the serve. You may name something off information or repeat focus words. You may ask a question that keeps the conversation going. There are examples of all of this in the toolkit. Something as simple as snack talk is a really easy way to add extra language rich interaction to your day.

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Anastasia Scott

Topic 4 of the Connect and Communicate Toolkit focuses on making sense of letters and sounds, including phonological awareness. Phonological awareness has been included in the Toolkit at the recommendation of some of our speech pathology contributors, including me. As Elise said, I was involved in the formulation of some of the content here and phonological awareness is an important pre literacy skill. A child's ability to manipulate sounds and consider words at a sound level in that year before school is a really strong indicator of reading and spelling success. So phonological awareness is the name for activities that many of you are already completing in daily activities. It's the understanding that words are made up of sounds and that they can be broken down into smaller parts. In the toolkit we've included activities and examples for syllabification, rhyme, and onset rime.

So when talking about rhyme and syllabification, and onset rhyme when working with phonological awareness experiences that teach larger sound units, for example syllables, their easier for kids to understand.

When engaging in the activities of the toolkit, we encourage you to progress in the order that we've suggested for the experiences as they work from larger units of sound down to the smallest.

But before we get on to our next activity, let's ensure we're all on the same page about the different types of phonological awareness activities. So syllabification is separating a word into syllables. Syllabification is easier when there are more syllables. for example. Butterfly is easier to separate out than cat. Hearing a pattern can really help children to pick up this skill.

Hearing words that rhyme is easier than producing them. Rhyme means that 2 words have a similar or the same final sounds. When talking about rhyme with children, it's completely fine if they come up with examples that are not real words. It shows that they're learning how to take the first sound off and make a new word that they just can't quite access in their word bank.

When identifying the initial and the final sounds in words we really children to be able to do this using the sound and not the letter name. So 'ke-' and not 'k'. You can see how this is an extension of hearing and producing rhyme as now we're isolating that beginning sound. Again, as in all the experiences, there's a continuum. First sounds are far easier for children to master than final sounds, and we'd expect them to have a solid grasp of first sounds before attempting final sounds. Sounds that last longer are also easier to find, so 'sssss' rather than 'te', 'mmmm' rather than 'pe'

Onset rhyme is the most challenging experience that we've included. In this one, segmenting and blending are about the same difficulty level and you may find different children excel at one or the other. An example of segmenting is, if I say cat, can you tell me what sounds make up cat? Blending is when I say 'ch-air,' can you tell me the word I've made?

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Ellen Niemiec

So this topic talks about the understanding and using concepts of print in both specific experiences and everyday routines.

So concepts of print refers to the initial understandings about written text, graphics and books, how they work to communicate meaning, and their links to spoken language. So the most effective way for children to understand concepts of print is through interactions with text. So this may be books, but can also be environmental print experiences using written words and letters.

Children aren't expected to master these skills before they start school, so exploring concepts of print is a good way to encourage engagement with printed texts and increase an awareness of these concepts.

So exploring letters, words and sentences. Developing word awarenesses is an early step in understanding the structure of spoken languages and assists in making connections between those spoken and written words. So some ideas that you might like to explore may be identifying both the uppercase and lowercase letters and what sounds that they make; drawing attention to the spaces that separate words; explaining that words help us tell stories; Investigating that a collection of letters and therefore sounds make a word and a collection of words make up a sentence; and you can talk about punctuation. So where can you do this? Book reading is always a great opportunity for these ideas to be applied, and we'll add some other ideas specifically for book reading in a moment.

Words you already have around your classroom is another opportunity. So considering words and labels you might have added to tote trays or your walls and those that are part of everyday materials such as recycled boxes and magazines and things you probably already have lying around your classrooms. Specific games and experiences. So the toolkit does include some letter and word cards and a range of experiences that you might be able to use those for.

Understanding Environmental Print. So environmental print refers to the many symbols, pictures, signs which convey meaning in a quick and efficient way. So there are many ways that you can support kids to engage with environmental print. A simple way to do this is a walking tour of your service, so, what signs can the children see? What do they think that they might mean? And this can include both the logos, advertisements, signs such as exit signs, anything that you have up and around in your environment. Talk about what it is, what you can see and what it means. So drawing attention to both the images and the written text begins to help children understand how both can convey meaning.

Books, so book orientation is another way we can explore concepts of print to help set the children up to be successful learners at school by explicitly drawing attention to book orientation and the organisation of the text.

So before you read a book, identify the front cover, identify the back cover, the top and the bottom. Use the real words such as title, illustrator, author, blurb. Explain what they mean. Identify the words and pictures on the front and the back cover.

Talk about the direction of the text. So in English we read left to right, top to bottom, but in other languages text may take different directions. If you have access to books in other languages, explore them. Talk about how the text is organised and identify the differences between the 2.

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Paige Marshall

Alright, so, I am sure not a day goes by in your centre where you don't pick up a book to share that book with the children in your care. Obviously it is a reading together and is such a wonderful, wonderful opportunity to maximise learning of both understanding language and talking and expressing language. So might go next slide if that's OK, there we go.

So we've got this term dialogic reading, and that simply means really having the children as active participants in the reading. We really having a conversation, a dialogue while we're reading. So as caregivers, as adults with the child we're really prompting that discussion about this shared focus of having a book there to talk about. And we're encouraging the children to really engage with those texts and become the storytellers here.

So books obviously also give us this wonderful opportunity to share concepts and vocabulary that aren't present every day for our kids. So things like, you know, outer space and dinosaurs and fantasy adventures, things like that. We're not having dragons in our centre, so how wonderful that we can explore these rich vocabulary worlds within the covers of our books. So today we're going to talk together about a few strategies.

So, obviously within early childhood education centres we're reading for so many different reasons. So that might be, you know, to explore a new concept with children. We might be looking at, you know counting together or learning our colours and having these beautiful books that might present that topic. Socially and emotionally navigating these complex relationships between peers. So that might be that drop offs are really hard for some kids and their missing their family, becoming friends, how we're going to be together, playing together.

For those big preschool kids who are off to school, you know, starting that thinking about that transition and having a lunch box and having a uniform is a really beautiful preparatory things that we can, you know, I believe there's a book for every occasion. That's certainly how it works in my house. We also might just be reading to settle, to come together, to connect in for the day, just for that pleasure of hearing a story.

And we know that kids love to read the same stories again and again and again, and they love to hear those stories that really connect to their everyday lives. So I just want to acknowledge that the strategies that we're going to talk about together today aren't things that we would do necessarily that first time we read a book. This is more for those additional readings, so each time you pick up that book the second time, the third time you can think about adding these additional strategies in to really deepen and strengthen the learning opportunities and the conversations available from the book that you've chosen.

Alright, so within the Connect and Communicate resource, these are 2 of the strategies that we will cover today and these are both available in the toolkit as print out resources that you you might like to laminate and maybe stick up in your book sharing space to have that little reminder, Oh yeah, I might do that sort of thing today.

So when we're looking at the PEER sequence here that's really looking more at making sure that the child's understanding the story, their comprehension and also looking at vocabulary within the context of our text. So the P stands for prompt, where you might ask a question about the book. You're thinking to yourself, evaluating, was their answer kind of correct? Did it match the question? You might then expand, so rephrase that child's response and add some more information. And then you might model and repeat that question just to ask it again in the moment, but also in subsequent readings just to build the confidence in answering that question.

So later on, I'll be using The Very Cranky Bear as my example. So in the context of that book, I might ask, you know, who are the characters in our story? And maybe the child might say back 'Bear'. And I could respond like, yeah, there is a bear in our story, the cranky bear, adding that extra information. There's also a zebra, a lion, a sheep and a moose, so just expanding there and providing that extra info. Then we might ask, so who are all the characters in our story? Just as a prompt there to go through.

OK. So the next little bit here is looking at types of questions that we might ask while we're sharing a story. And that's more of the crowd strategy that that poster will talk you through, the different types of questions. So I know earlier in the series you spoke about tiers of vocabulary and looking at how some vocabulary, some words are much more simple and others progress in complexity and maybe frequency of use.

So here we've got, you know, obviously questions are a wonderful way to check understanding and prompt the children to express their thoughts and their ideas. Sometimes we can overuse questions a little bit and use them thinking that's going to really encourage a child to talk. But you want to be mindful about ratio, I suppose. Some children need that model as well and might be really nervous and when asked a question and just shut down a little bit. So I always like to offer the ratio of five. So one question, maybe 4 comments that might look like, you know, I will just be looking at the pictures and commenting. "That boys eating spaghetti! Oh what can I see here, I can see a little bug hiding under the leaf. What can you see?" And so I'm providing the model of the kind of language that we're thinking about and then just having one question to kind of prompt.

So here on your screen, you can kind of see the levels of questioning that we're talking about. So level 1 where the answers really on the page directly in front of you and the response to those questions from the kids might not be that they say anything but I might point to, you know, "where is the lady bird?" and they might point "there it is." Again expecting that there may be a lot of pointing in this kind of level as well or accepting those nonverbal responses as well as a serve and return in that dialogue that will just you know, you talked on before and we will touch on again later. So similar questions also include, you know, yes or no questions and really these simple where, what, who kind of questions. So level 2 that's looking more that the answer is in front of you, but you might need to do a little bit of searching. So a bit more abstract, you know, what is happening here, a bit more open questions rather than those closed questions, you know, what do you use a shovel for? Or can you find something that is red. So it's a little bit more complex.

Level 3 questions, so the answer isn't in front of you, but you have to use clues from what you can see and what you've already heard to make your own answer, to form your own answer. And that's that beginning of what we'll talk about shortly of inferencing. So putting those clues together to be able to think about,

You know, what is a...? How do you think the sheep feels? And how does you know, how does this boy feel? He's fallen off his bike. All of those sort of questions. And then level 4 is the answer is still not in front of you. But this is more of your own opinion. So what do you think will happen next? What will happen if that rock gets in the way? What could they do?You know whatever is presenting to you in, these are obviously general questions and you will specify them more for the book that you're reading.

Remembering each child is at their own level and so you can kind of see maybe I'm asking these questions at Level 3, they're not quite, you know, understanding those yet. You can still ask them and model a response so they're learning about that question, but also move back to those level 2 and level 1 questions to support them in feeling like they're having success in those interactions as well. An extra little tip, sometimes if we give a forced choice, like, you know, is the monkey going to eat an apple or a banana? That's another way to, you know, make those a bit more simple. And sometimes for kids who have a bit of trouble, put what is the correct response as the second choice, as the last one they hear will help them respond correctly sometimes as well.

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