Early Years child development training
The government have set up online training which provides support and guidance for the early years sector. Get free online training from the DfE (Department of Education).
Module 4 is all about supporting language development in young children and there will be further modules released in the near future.
Also available is the Help for Early Years Providers pages. There is a section on literacy with videos and ideas to support play and development.
Key sites
Booktrust is the UK's largest children’s reading charity. Their website includes extensive resources for families and professionals including tips to support reading, booklists, articles and animated books.
Words for Life is an informative website for parents and professionals by the National Literacy Trust, including developmental milestones and children’s book suggestions.
The World Book Day website is packed with inspiration, resources, games, videos, and tips to help you celebrate books and reading all year round.
The Making it Raising Early Achievement in Literacy (REAL) project has ideas to support children’s early literacy, with an emphasis on the home learning environment.
Talk for Meaning is a selection of resources by independent expert consultant Michael Jones.
Making Their Mark: Children’s Early Writing is an Early Education booklet by Penny Tassoni.
PACEY has materials on supporting the development of mark-making and.materials on literacy.
Mark Making Matters from the National Strategy for Early Years archive.
The Hanen Centre have a very highly recommended series of YouTube videos of their Book Nook materials. These are intended for parents in particular, but are an excellent resource for teams to use to refresh their story reading skills. Featured books include Giraffes Can’t Dance and Goodnight Gorilla.
Articles and other resources
Reading
Excellent ‘top tips’ for reading out loud to children, from Booktrust.
Get involved with the annual National Poetry Day, on the first Thursday of October.
An amazing free YouTube library of Michael Rosen’s songs, poems and rhymes, featuring Michael Rosen.
The Pie Corbett reading spine ‘top texts’ are useful if you're thinking of a core approach. The Talk for Writing programme was also devised by Pie.
A free pack of activities based on the Very Hungry Caterpillar from PACEY.
Helping children understand that words can be broken down into individual sounds is called sound awareness or “phonological awareness”. This essential early literacy skill has been linked to better reading and writing skills later on. In this phonological awareness development video from Ideas from the Hanen Centre, we share a fun technique for building your child’s sound awareness with the children’s book Room on the Broom.
Helicopter Stories includes a range of early years storytelling and poetry programmes to support the emotional, cognitive and linguistic development of children aged 2 to 7.
Letterbox Library is a great source of books with a focus on equalities, inclusion and diversity.
The superb Bookfinder website from BookTrust has great ideas for all ages of children, including the Tony Ross 'I want a bunny' book.
How well do you know your nursery rhymes? Try this nursery rhyme quiz from BookTrust.
Writing
Interesting ideas for mark-making from Early Learning HQ.
Top tips for engaging boys in mark making, from an action research project by Julie Cigman.
Therapy Street For Kids supports parents and carers of children who are having occupational therapy. There are lots of ideas to support pre-writing skills.
An imaginative way to develop meaningful print outdoors from Creative Star Learning.