Helping students with visual theraurus

 Picture this scene in a writing lesson at school: the experienced teacher has a small queue of fidgety eight year old children, waiting for her attention, as they had completed their story about a recent holiday trip. Each page had been beautiful drafted, featuring many of the key targets for each individual child’s progress. As the teacher went through the essays, one by one, she discovered a common problem – her class had no understanding of how to improve their work using a thesaurus. They had successfully removed the words ‘happy’ and ‘sad’ from their pages, just as she had instructed, and replaced them with substitutes such as depressed, suicidal and ecstatic, none of which made sense in the context. But, why should they? The children had no idea what these words mean!

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That night, being the conscientious soul that she was, she tossed and turned, trying to overcome this problem in a simple way which didn’t require her to have children constantly asking her for help in identifying better words. As she dreamt, the queue to her table grew longer and longer, snaking down the corridor all the way to the Head teacher’s office! The next morning, tired and cold, she stumbled to school, grabbed a coffee and sat down, sullen and alone in her classroom. She felt powerless to know how to act.

Just at that moment, a colleague from her year group came round the corner and, having seen her bedraggled condition, listened to her problem. She hurriedly left the room, before returning with slightly red cheeks and a multi-coloured book in her hands. It was the solution to her class needs – ‘The Visual Emotional Thesaurus’!

“Each book is like a mini-teacher that can be left in the middle of the children’s table. The book explains to the class through images and examples, how to improve their writing and broaden their emotional language effectively. It has banished ‘happy’, ‘sad’ and a multitude of repetitious vocabulary from their writing. Moreover, even children who used to struggle to grasp thesauri found the images enabled them to access the book too! I can come and teach the children how to use the book today, if you will allow me to, and I guarantee that your children will have a clearer understanding of how to enrich their description of characters by the end of the half hour.”

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Our class teacher nodded, pleased that the children would have a way forward, and that tonight, she would get a well deserved night’s sleep.

-Ian Long

Speechmark author of The Blob Visual Emotional Thesaurus

5 key activities to teaching young children to stay safe

Teachers should ensure that young children develop an awareness of personal safety as it helps them to identify and express their feelings, make choices and solve problems. It's important to start this intervention at an early age, giving children the skills they can learn to prevent possible abuse. Authors Carolyn Gelenter, Nadine Prescott, & Belinda Riley of Teaching Protective Behaviours to Young Children give us 5 key activities which can be easily incorporated into the classroom activities to instill protective behaviours among students.

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1. Share the 2 key themes of protective behaviours outlined below with the children. Say them repeatedly so that children really integrate the themes into their everyday understanding, play and learning.

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2. Think of 5 agreements you will have in the classroom that reinforce the 2 key themes. Get these ideas from the children. They might include for example, we all want to be listened to or we go to an adult when something really hurts our bodies or our feelings.

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3. Teach children the correct names of body parts. Use those names cross-curricular where relevant. The more commonly used the words penis and vagina become the more children will normalise them as parts of the body to be taken care of, rather to be seen as 'rude' or 'private'. Private becomes associated with shame and secrets rather than a child's right to determine who gets to touch those parts of the body.

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4. Play lots of games that reinforce the ideas they are learning!  A great one to play that creates a scary but safe feeling is 'Monsters'. The children are arranged in a circle. One child is the 'monster'. They creep up to a child in the circle who has to call out the name of another child before the monster reaches them or they turn into the monster!

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5.Reward children for sticking to the class agreements through allowing time for additional games or extra play time.

The two key themes from Protective Behaviours sum up the kind of citizens we can support young children to grow up to be in a world where a right to feel safe needs to run alongside the need for taking responsibility, starting with ourselves.

“Everyone has the right to feel safe all the time

There is nothing so awful or small that we can’t talk about it with someone”.

As education professionals we know this programme is helpful. It reinforces every child’s right to be taught these basic skills with evidenced-based practical strategies, activities and resources. Research shows that children need those skills right now, before abuse occurs. As responsible adults who care about the children and young people in our society, we believe it should be mandatory to teach protective behaviours in every early years’ service, school and educational setting - have you got your copy?

- Carolyn Gelenter, Nadine Prescott, Belinda Riley
Speechmark authors of Teaching Protective Behaviours to Young Children

Benefits of the Wordless Picture Books & Guide

Developing narrative skills

Developing narrative skills are essential to communicating, socialising, literacy and academic progress. In fact it is well documented that narrative skills are a good predictor for literacy skills and academic progress (Bishop & Edmundson (1987); Boudreau et al. (1999); Naremore (1995); Feagans (1982)). Being able to coherently order and share key events, so that the listener can understand and follow, can be a challenging task for all children developing these skills, but especially for children with speech, communication and language needs.  Narrative skills emerge from the age of three and start with skills such as sequencing, linking events with conjunctions, and more complex skills are developed later such as: explaining cause and effect, describing characters emotions and intentions, and being able to interpret endings. Learning to tell stories is one way of building these skills and wordless picture books have their own particular advantages for developing them. Although, there are many wordless picture books available on the market, not all suit the needs of children with speech, communication and language needs.  My series of wordless picture books and guide have been developed especially for these children. Three main advantages of my resource are highlighted below.

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Benefit 1: Better Comprehension for the child

Often children with gaps in their receptive and expressive language skills will rely on pictures in books to help them understand stories, but this can be problematic because children’s books rely on the text to carry stories, and the pictures are often there to accompany the text. I’ve created the wordless books to address this problem- the pictures in these books carry the stories- and they follow a film scroll approach- leaving short gaps between each stage of the story. They are also centered on familiar events such as making a sandwich and going to a supermarket. This formula makes the books accessible to children who are developing their language skills and require that extra support for better comprehension.

For the same reasons outlined above, the resource could be useful for EAL learners (children for who English is another language) and for children who are deaf, as both groups may rely on pictures to understand stories.  

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Benefit 2: Adaptable to a child’s language level

Another strength of wordless picture books is the level of language used to tell the story can be adapted by the child and adult to whatever level the child is at. The books are accompanied by a guide for the practitioner which includes scripts for the stories. The stories can be told at three different sentence and narrative levels: simple, intermediate and complex. The sentences levels are based on key narrative skill development areas and start from simple clauses to sentences tying in events and the reactions of characters.  

Wordless books also provide more opportunity for a child and adult to make meaning of the story collaboratively which can lead to exposing the child to more complex language than would have occurred using general books. Researchers Gillam & Boyce (2012) have found that “when creating a story or just responding to pictures, the parent used many words and complex sentence structures while engaging with their child. That level of engagement wasn’t as present when reading books with text,” said Gillam.

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Benefit 3: Multifunctional for teaching and generalising key skills

The wordless books were created with the aim of teaching and generalising key additional skills which facilitate narrative comprehension and storytelling such as: WH questions, inference, time concepts, sequencing, emotions, and cause and effect. A chapter is devoted to each of these skills in the guide book, and for ease of use, each chapter contains a thorough list of questions or skills needed to work on that skill.  Beth Gibby, Highly Specialist Speech and Language Therapist, who has trialed the resource has commented on the usefulness of this ‘This resource makes it easy to work on lots of different skills at the same time, whilst reading one story…’

- Kulvinder Kaur
Speechmark author of Wordless Picture Books and Guide