Joining In Chatter Matters Week 2019

The children at Daisykins @ Whitehall have had a very busy time participating in Chatters Matters Week. This fun week aims
to raise awareness of the importance of supporting early interactions from the moment children are born. This year's Chatter Matters theme was 'bounce it back', this promoted the importance of to and fro interaction, building on developing children's communication skills.

For Chatters Matters week this year the children at Daisykins @ Whitehall had lots of fun improving their communication and language skills through books and Makaton signing. Makaton is a simple way of communicating through signs which is useful for those who cannot communicate due to speech barriers, these signs are often for the main words in a sentence. This is different to British Sign Language which is more complex and often used by the deaf community.

The children from across the nursery came together to enjoy various stories across the week. A favourite story they shared was ‘what the ladybird heard’ This was read by practitioner Ann. Natalie the settings SENDCO joined Ann by using makaton signing as Ann read the story.

The story was read slowly and the children were given the opportunity to copy the signs as the story went on. The children learnt lots of signs and were able to successfully copy signs for ‘lanky len’ a key character in the book and for many of the animals including ‘cow’, ‘pig’, ‘ladybird’, ‘goose’, and ‘cat’

The children had so much fun enjoying the stories and copying the signs. Throughout the week many of the children continued to learn how to sign many other words and phrases. This has been a very successful week with the children developing many communication and language skills.