Gypsy Roma Traveller Leeds
The permanent site of the Gypsy Roma Traveller Communities
Text Size |
Images in this section
Images in the ECAT section of our website come from the National Strategies pdf documents: Every Child a Talker: Guidance for Early Language Lead Practitioners.
These documents are available from The National Strategies website.
What is Every Child a Talker?
Every Child a Talker (ECAT) is designed to help you and your colleagues create a developmentally appropriate, supportive and stimulating environment in which children can enjoy experimenting with and learning language. It can be implemented whether children are in Early Years settings, with a childminder or at home with their parents. Through everyday, fun and interesting activities which reflect children’s interests, ECAT will encourage early language development right from the outset, extending children’s vocabulary and helping them build sentences so that before they start school, children are confident and skilled communicators.
Improving practice in Early Years settings is important, but providing lots of opportunities for language learning in the home is vital – it makes the biggest difference to how well a child goes onto achieve. So as well as practitioners talking expressively to children as a matter of routine in the setting, Early Years practitioners should be encouraging the same practice by parents at home.
ECAT will offer parents – fathers as well as mothers – ideas about how to support their child’s early language development such as using activities and songs, suggestions of different books, regular visits to the library and story-sharing sessions which parents can join too. ECAT will help to give you and your colleagues the skills and confidence to support parents more effectively, making good links between play and learning in the setting and play and learning at home. As practitioners, you will be talking regularly with parents about how well their child’s language is developing and will be sharing their learning journey.
(Extract from the introduction of Every Child a Talker : Guidance for Early Language Lead Practitioners)
See examples of activities that have taken place in Leeds which typically occur every day in Early Years settings and describe ways in which they can be used to promote children’s language development. They describe planning an activity and then evaluate the outcome.
Download ECAT documents:
Every Child a Talker: Guidance for Early Language Lead Practitioners (First instalment)
Every Child a Talker: Guidance for Early Language Lead Practitioners (Second instalment)
For more information please contact:
Sue Gold: Leeds Gypsy Roma Traveller Achievement Service
0113 274 8050
Leeds Early Language Consultant; Tricia Bell
0113 295 118
Section Contents
Project Examples
Further information
What is ECAT?
A national initiative to:
- raise children’s achievement in early language
- raise practitioners’ skills, knowledge and understanding
- increase parental understanding and involvement in children’s language development
22 early years settings across Leeds are now working with Leeds Early Language Consultant, Tricia Bell to implement the programme in its initial stages.