00:14 --> 01:11 Welcome to Tales Toolkit. I'm really excited that you've become part of this project and I'm sure you're gonna have lots of fun storytelling with your children. You're gonna learn how to use the power of story to develop lots of skills with your children. Communication, creativity, social skills, engaging boys with writing, expect lots of fun storytelling. Here's a brief overview of the sessions to come. Training 1 - This is an important session where we discuss providing children with quality interactions. Training 2 - Learn how to use our big bags for group stories Training 3 - Learn how to use the rest of the Tales Toolkit resources, encouraging your children to become independent storytellers. Training 4 - Learn how to use the Tales Toolkit resources to develop muscles for writing and all of the Tales Toolkit writing resources are introduced during this session. Training 5 - Take time to reflect on best practice. 01:11 --> 01:28 So it might seem a little bit odd that we're not gonna be using Tales Toolkit in this session, but instead we're going to explain the problem we're trying to solve as it's really important that everyone has an understanding before we begin. And then in the second part of the training, we'll discuss what you can do about it. 01:28 --> 02:18 I'm Kate, I'm the founder of Tales Toolkit and I've worked managing earlier settings in some of the boroughs with the highest rates of child poverty. And I've seen children coming in at very different levels. And a lot of the schools I've worked in have had huge attainment gaps. So for example, in one school I worked in, there was a child that came in that was really into Dr. Who and knew all of the storylines. And he'd come in and he'd tell you in great detail what had been happening and he would get all of his friends engaged in the play and ordering them and getting them to act out different parts. And on the other side, I had a child that came in that couldn't even communicate basic needs. He found it very hard to interact with other children in the setting, couldn't come up with his own ideas. And for the first week, he went round tipping over every container that he could find, just exploring what was there, including the water tray, to the great joy of the staff, over and over again. 02:18 --> 03:01 Does this sound familiar? We were really curious about what happened for the children before they came into school. What was happening that caused this massive gap in terms of attainment. And what we found was really key, was the quality of the interactions the children had with their families before they came to school. And this is what underpins everything that we do in Tales Toolkit. At this point, I would love to give you a clever definition of what I mean by quality interactions, but there's so many strands involved that this is really tricky and I did give it a good shot. So instead, over today's training, we're gonna talk about quality interactions and let it unfold what I mean by this. But to get you started, here's just a few people talking about what they think quality interactions are. Dr Alice Jones Bertoli 03:01 --> 03:26 Quality interactions are, um, about a child and an adult getting together and thinking about something together. So beyond sort of somebody directing somebody else or, um, I dunno, asking a question and getting a straightforward answer, a really quality interaction is going to involve, a deeper layer of discussion and a bit of back and forth. Julie Holmes 03:26 --> 04:12 So I think a quality interaction is really where an adult is on a child's level. So that means kind of physically, um, on the child, on the child's level, and also kind of face to face with the child so that the, um, child can see your face and you can see the child's face. Um, it's really important to go with the child's pace. So we want to be going at kind of their pace, not at ours. So we, and to help us to do that, we follow their lead in play and their lead at language. So instead of us initiating, we would wait for them to initiate the interaction. We would wait for them to say something vocalized, show us what they want before we would then kind of follow them, um, and follow their lead in play. And the most important thing is that it's fun. So it has to be motivating. It has to be kind of, something that the child wants to do. Kate Shelley 04:12 --> 04:53 So let's start by discussing the problem. What are your highest aims for the children that you work with? Is it getting them to sit quietly on the carpet ,or line up neatly so that they can queue properly as adults? Hmm. Is it about SATS results? If you're anything like me, you're all about setting children up to be successful, creative, happy adults. We know how hard it is working in a school. The pressures of record keeping, planning, targets, progress. Shall I go on? I went into teaching because I wanted to make a difference to children throughout their lives. And it's really easy with all of the pressures of day-to-day targets, to lose sight of that big picture. 04:53 --> 05:17 A global survey of 1,700 CEOs looked into the top skills most crucial for success in business. And we're going to reveal them in just a minute. But before we do that, I want you to imagine A thriving, successful, 30-year-old. Have a chat in your groups and note down on the sheet what you think are the top skills that are most crucial for success in life. 05:17 --> 07:17 - 2 MINUTE DISCUSSION TIME 07:17 --> 07:22 - Alarm sounds for the end of discussion time Kate Shelley 07:22 --> 07:33 So what do you think the CEOs thought were the top three business skills, collaboration, communication, and creativity. Interesting, isn't it? 07:33 --> 09:33 - Time to discuss if you agree 09:33 --> 09:38 - Alarm Sounds for the end of discussion time Kate Shelley 09:38 --> 09:43 We asked some professionals what they thought the top skills for success were. Chloe Surowiec 09:43 --> 10:07 Some of the ones that spring to mind are, um, the ability, the ability to communicate really effectively with a very diverse range of people. You find all sorts of people at work and all of them communicate in different ways. So being able to adapt your approach is really important. And imagination. So being able to think about things from a variety of different angles to try and work out the best solution to the problem that you are trying to solve at work. Danielle Colaco 10:07 --> 10:24 To be able to communicate with other people. Um, people work very differently and are very different as people. So it's important to be able to understand, um, how people come to a decision. A lot of my work involves collaboration. So that comes into being able to understand and communicate with people effectively. Kate Shelley 10:24 --> 11:10 We know it's a huge jump for you to move from thinking about the 3-year-old you're teaching to being 30 year olds, but it's really vital that you do that now because the key time for making a difference is when children are young. Especially in the early years, with 85% of brain development happening before the age of five. You might think that this isn't your problem, but these children now are gonna be the future workforce, fighting crime, building your homes and researching cures to disease and working as nurses and carers looking after your parents and even you one day. So we have an important job on our hands. Where do we start? We've done lots of research into this and we've found that underlying everything is developing quality interactions. And this is really important. 11:10 --> 11:58 Let me tell you about two researchers called Hart and Risley. They saw there was a big problem. Children were coming into school really struggling with language and this was having consequences all the way through their lives. They were really curious to find out what was going on for these children at home, before they came into school. They created a long-term study and went into the homes of 42 families. And there they hit on the unexpected. The difference in the outcomes they saw were not about race, gender, or the neighborhood they lived in. The big difference was determined by the quality of interactions the children had with their families. It was all about the number and quality of the words they heard. And there's a correlation between low income families and the number and quality of words heard. 11:58 --> 12:57 For children from low income families, they heard on average 600 words per hour. And for children from professional families, they heard on average 2000 words an hour. That's 600 versus 2000. The majority of talk was discouragement or instructions. And for the children that were from homes that had low quality interactions, for every encouragement they heard, they heard six discouragements, put on your coat, get off that wall, be quiet, stop doing that. This not only impacted language, but you can imagine what this does to the emotional wellbeing of a child. And by contrast on the other side, the language rich families were having really positive chats with their child. Over three years they heard 30 million more words. So I want you to take a minute now in your group and think about the interactions that you see for the families of your children and think about the impact that this might have. 12:57 --> 14:57 - 2 minutes group discussion 14:57 --> 15:20 - Alarm sounds to mark the end of group discussion 15:20 --> 17:20 - 2 minutes to share ideas 17:20-17:25 - Alarm sounds to mark the end of sharing time Kate Shelley 17:26 --> 18:16 Children lacking quality interactions were already fallen behind at the age of three years old. When Hart and Risely went back five years later, they found the gap had widened and the children lacking quality interactions at home were even further behind. The children who had high quality interactions at home went on to do well in reading tests at eight years old and then went on to do well all the way through their school life. Neurological development of the brain depends on words. The first time you hear a word, brain pathways are created and every time you hear the word, they're strengthened and expanded. With lack of exposure to talk those pathways shrink and die and ability to learn decreases. This is extremely worrying when we know that 85% of the brain is developed by the age of five. Julie Holmes 18:16 --> 19:04 And actually the really key thing is that when you are kind of looking at new objects, that actually you're hearing the word that goes with it and you're getting lots of opportunities to hear that word again and again and again for you to be able to learn it. So if I was to give an example of, um, when a child's learning the word dog and they have a dog at home, every time the dog comes in, mom might say, oh, it's dog. When the child looks at it might say there's dog. And the child slowly learns or quickly learns that actually that's a dog. The child may then go outside and see a cat and say, dog, 'cause they've actually learned, an animal that has four legs is, is um, is called dog. But then when they see it, the mom might say cat because they see a new animal. And so the child then makes those links between animals and builds up the vocabulary and the language. Kate Shelley 19:04 --> 19:08 It's not just about words. We want to share with you the communication tree. Julie Holmes 19:09 --> 20:00 Before you get to that stage, you are talking about the sounds of words and you get to that stage where you are using language kind of fluently. There's lots of things that happen. And this is what we call kind of like our base communication skills or the communication skills that are at the root of that communication tree. Um, so the first thing that's really important is attention and listening. Um, and this is, this is important simply because we learn language, we learn how to communicate by attending to something and by listening. So, and the other area that is really important to develop, um, kind of early on in your communication is your play skills. Because without good play skills, you're not getting yourself involved in lots of different toys and different, um, types of play becomes different language and like language learning opportunities. Um, the other area is, um, social skills. Um, and this is really, really, really core to all communication. Kate Shelley 20:00 --> 20:25 So do you have children coming into school and unable to play, struggling to pay attention? Does this sound familiar? Maybe it's because they're missing the roots of the communication tree. Play is right down at the roots and it's critical in developing creativity. And this is the next on our list of CEO wants. It's really important that we think of creativity as more than art. Dr Julien Grenier 20:26 --> 21:00 Creativity is really fundamental to children's learning in the early years, but actually going on through the school system. Um, and by creativity we're not really thinking just of painting and making things and so on, important though those are. But we are really thinking about children as creative thinkers. Can they imagine, if they're faced with a problem, can they find different ways of taking that problem on and solving it? Um, can they come up with their own ideas? If they're stuck, can they get someone else involved to help them? Kate Shelley 21:00 --> 21:42 You might have heard of the Torrance test of creativity. This is actually a better indicator of lifetime success than IQ. This test has been used since 1958 and there's something really worrying that's emerging. Children's creativity is decreasing. Researchers found that the common strand in the children with the highest levels of creativity was the interactions that they had with their families. So, if they're so important, why aren't these interactions happening? I want you to have a think about that. In your groups, get together and write down why you think these interactions aren't happening for the families that you work with. 21:42 --> 24:42 3 minutes to discuss in a groups 24:42 --> 25:04 Alarm sounds to mark the end of discussion time 25:04 --> 27:04 2 Minutes to share ideas 27:04 --> 27:10 - Alarm sounds to mark the end of sharing 2 minutes Kate shelley 27:10 --> 27:12 So what's going on for these children at home? Dr Alice Jones Bartoli 27:13 --> 27:16 Parents sometimes don't get as much opportunity to interact with their children as they might like, because they're really time limited. Lots of us, me included, work long hours. And then when we get out of work, you know, time with a child is ordinarily spent about, you know, having dinner, getting a bath, going to bed. It's quite difficult sometimes to make sure that in your day you're doing something that's fun or not about, you know, an end goal, like eating your dinner and you know, getting in your pyjamas. Kate shelley 27:45 --> 28:24 Research shows children aren't playing out as much as they used to and instead they spend lots more time inside exposed to screen time. And it's with this background that many children enter school and in school there's an increasing pressure to prove impact and show progress. So it's really easy to lose sight of that big picture. So we've talked about what the problem is. What can you do about it? Tales Toolkit is going to give you lots of opportunities to provide children with quality interactions. Rapport is the first and most important thing. At its heart it's all about the children loving being with you and you loving being with the children. Julie Holmes 28:26 --> 28:31 Sit face to face with them. Ensure that you can see, um, them and they can see you Dr Julian Grenier 28:31 --> 28:34 Liaise really closely with parents all of the time Rebecca Sherwood 28:34 --> 28:42 Get their learning journey book and sit with them 'cause there's nothing that they like better than to sit with someone and talk about their families. Talk about the things they did and celebrate their achievements Dr Alice Jones Bertoli 28:42 --> 00:28:47 Their ideas, their feelings, whatever it is that they're talking about are being validated by an adult. Kate Shelley 28:48 --> 29:28 If you've built this rapport, then your child will know that you care for them and they'll build a relationship of trust with you. For the rest of the session, we are going to discuss quality interactions. And I could talk about this all day, but instead I'm gonna give you four top tips to think about. 1. Let the child lead 2. Tune in 3. Careful use of language 4. and careful use of questioning. It's extraordinary how much learning comes naturally when we start to follow the child. You'll up the levels of engagement, you'll see the child become more confident, and also you'll start to build that rapport that we've just been talking about. And it's amazing what you can find out. Rebecca Sherwood 29:28 --> 29:38 You've got children who may be absolute experts on a comic character or a superhero that actually you can learn from them and other children can learn from them and they actually teach each other. Kate Shelley 29:38 --> 30:42 So to create those interesting moments and up levels of engagement, follow the child's interest. The Hanon Center has developed the three A's method. Allow, Adapt, Add. Allow the child to take the lead, slow down, watch what they're doing, give them time and count to 10 before you jump in and take over with your own agenda. It feels like a really long time, doesn't it? Adapt the situation. How can you join in? Do you need to get an extra car or make a space so that you can join in the moment without interrupting. And use mirroring to help get into the child's play. Sit down opposite them and copy what the child does. Add - What can you add to extend learning, whether it's adding language at the right level to extend the child's vocab, or is it the resources that you add to stimulate curiosity? 30:42 --> 31:40 And the next tip is tune in. Take time to stand back and observe what children are doing before you jump in with your big feet. It's really easy to interfere in children's play or to have your own ideas about what they should be doing. In one nursery, there was a group of boys that came in every day, got the spades out, and they went to the digging patch to dig great big holes. And at the end of the day, the staff would plan all sorts of clever things to extend the learning for these children. They added sieves and scoops and different containers. And every day the boys would come in, move all the stuff that the staff had set out and they'd get on with digging their holes. And it wasn't until somebody went over and sat and listened to what the children were doing that they realized they were actually playing pirates. And when we got treasure and buried in the mud and we brought out pirate dressing up outfits, we ended up having a whole topic for about half a term where everybody in the nursery got involved in pirate role play. And it really extended their learning. 31:40 --> 32:05 Taking time to stand back, listen and watch what the child is doing before you get involved is okay. You might be worried that your head thinks that you're standing around doing nothing, but we say in early years it's okay unless you see somebody lying down with their eyes closed. And for head teachers and early years coordinators, we say, get in, talk to the staff and ask them what they're observing and what they can see in the children's play. Julie Holmes 32:06 --> 33:04 If we use OWL, um, we can actually sit back and notice, notice things about the child that we may not ordinarily notice. So, you know, by observing, so it stands for observe, wait, listen. So by observing the child, you're noticing actually what it is, you've put out some toys, but maybe they haven't necessarily taken interest in the thing that you thought they might, they might have taken interest in something else. And then if you continue to observe, you might notice they're doing something different with the toy that's actually really interesting and fun and good. Um, and if you then listen, you can listen to what they're telling you. So it might be, again, um, non-verbally, they might be telling you, I love this block, it's great, it makes loads of noise. Um, and by observing them play with it and observing their face and their reactions, you can really understand that's what they're communicating to you. Um, and by listening to that as well, you can then, then you can respond in a really sensitive way. Kate Shelley 33:04 --> 33:52 The third tip is careful use of language. Think about your audience. Think, am I understood? It's really hard for children that have got low levels of language to tune in, and it's even harder if there's lots of background noise. And also if the children have got English as an additional language. So here's just a few tips for you to think about. Keep it simple. Speak at the child's level. If the child is speaking with two or three words, then just slightly extend this. So they might say, want ball? And you can say back, you want the ball? Slow down your talk so the children can understand. Speak clearly. And our final tip, don't ask too many questions. Become a conversation partner. Julie Holmes 33:52 --> 35:01 If you're asking questions that are either too high level for the child, so that's too, too, um, too complicated for a child that can put a lot of pressure on a child, um, and, and kind of, you know, um, make them feel under pressure and stressed or, you know, if they don't have the answers, it can be quite, it can be quite a negative experience, difficult for them to answer. Um, or if you ask too many questions, you're gonna, you possibly are going too fast for the child and they, you know, you haven't waited them to process what you've asked before You've asked the next one. Similarly, if you ask a, a child a question like, um, what's this? Because you, you know, you want them to say the name of an object. So if you're asking, oh, what's this? What's this? Um, if they know the answer and you know the answer, you know, they know that already, you're not really getting too much outta that interaction. And if they don't know the answer, you're, you're kind of putting them under pressure again. And you're also not really telling them very much. So they might learn that actually this object is a what's this? 'cause you're telling them it's, you know, you're saying, what's this? And they're matching. What's this to the object that you're holding out? Kate Shelley 35:01 --> 36:24 The more extended conversations that children have with genuinely interested adults, the better conversation they become. And this helps them to become good communicators. Remember those CEOs we mentioned earlier? Asking fewer questions can be really difficult. So we've got a few prompts that can help you. Use your senses, describe what you see, hear, feel, taste. Share emotions, use feeling words, excited, happy, sad, angry. Role play, create a storyline. Relate to your own experience. Let's model this with a child, playing with a baby. Mm, your baby smells clean like baby shampoo. I feel happy when I hold a baby. Your baby's sleeping, maybe he's been busy playing all day. My sister has a baby, he cries very loudly. So now it's your turn. Your Tales Toolkit facilitator has stuck up posters around the room for the four prompts. I want you to split into four groups and each group select a poster to start at each time thinking of comments that you can make that relate to the scenario of a child playing with his cars. You might want to picture a particular child in your setting. 36:24 --> 44:24 8 minutes to working in groups 44:24 --> 44:46 Alarm to mark the end of group work session 44:46 --> 46:46 2 minutes to discuss what was talked about in groups 46:46 --> 46:52 Alarm sounds to mark the end of the discussion Kate Shelley 46:52 --> 47:15 So how was that? It can be really tricky and it's something you really have to think about. I've got a few examples from other staff. I can see the car going really fast. I can hear his tires screeching. I get angry when I'm stuck in traffic jams. Your car's really speedy, maybe he's in a police chase. I drive slowly on windy lanes. Julie Holmes 47:15 --> 47:35 So if I was to take an example of the bus, so before I ask a question about a bus, I might say, oh, bus, bus is driving. It's the big bus. It's the red bus. Oh, where's the bus? So I would say kind of four comments to one question is a nice balance. Kate Shelley 47:35 --> 48:46 So just to clarify, we're not saying that questions are bad, we just want you to think about how and when you use them. Let's start by talking about open-ended questions. A project across 11 local authorities found the most worrying finding was the lack of sustained shared purposeful talk with only 5% of adults using open-ended questions. If you do have to ask questions, make them open-ended. A closed question is one that only has one answer. What color is it? How many eyes do you have? How old are you? Questions that only have one answer are rarely gonna lead to exciting discussions. Open-ended questions have got lots and lots of possible answers. So what makes fairies happy? Why do elephants have big ears? Where do you think electricity comes from? Ooh, what would you put in a magic potion? Generate curiosity by asking interesting questions. The best questions are those that stimulate thinking and don't have an obvious answer. Use questions that show you're genuinely interested. Children know when we're genuinely interested or when we're actually just asking a question to get the answers that we want. 48:46 --> 49:48 A child's making a potion. So if you ask what will happen if we drink it, it's a lot more likely to start a conversation than you going in and saying, what color is it? And ask questions that you don't know the answer to. There's nothing more fun than finding out alongside the children. During the Pirate Project, I found out that pirates used to eat their own shoes. I genuinely found this really interesting. I told all of my friends and now I'm telling you. And lastly, use questions that model thinking. Oh, I wonder what would happen if, oh, I'm trying to remember where I've seen this before. Oh, I really want to know more about... At the beginning of today's session, we said that quality interactions was too big an idea to put into one sentence. We've just scratched the surface today. There's lots more to list, but I hope you've got a better understanding and you've got some top tips you can take away and start using to make a difference and set your children up to become flourishing 30 year olds. Without quality interactions children struggle all the way through life. Julian Grenier 49:48 --> 50:13 Early years is the time when children really develop, themselves as learners. And a lot of the things that are really important in early years are how children go about their learning, just as much as what they actually learn. So we know that children who become resilient and resourceful learners age 2, 3, 4, 5, they'll carry those characteristics on through their later schooling. Kate Shelley 50:13 --> 50:14 And if we don't make a difference now, then children have got a much higher chance of unemployment, mental health issues, and even prison. We have no idea what the future holds for the children in your class or even what jobs will exist. But what we do know is that children with communication skills, creativity, and high levels of wellbeing, they're far better in an ever-changing world. Now is the time to give them quality interaction.