Ready, Steady, Listen

This week at Footsteps the children are taking part in Ready, Steady, Listen. This is in partnership with Usborne Books. The aim is to allow children to develop a passion of reading and listening for pleasure.

So this week the children will be sponsored to listen for an amount of time per day with their parent, an adult or older child. Usborne books will then offer up to 60% of the money raised in free books to our nurseries.

What is listening?

Listening is not as simple as it sounds – it is not simply hearing what a person says!

Listening is about hearing sounds, hearing a person’s voice, looking at a person, filtering out background noise, understanding what is being said, and doing all this for a period of time. It’s a hard task to perfect and so we should be supporting children to develop this skill all the time, so they can then go on to develop in other areas of learning.

So why is listening so important for children?

Listening is an important skill to help to develop communication and language in children. Without listening a child cannot distinguish sounds in words, leading to an impact on speech and language skills which in turn can affect the child’s reading level and understanding. Language is also used when we are social and our understanding of our language helps to increase our social skills.

What do we do to promote listening at Footsteps?

To help develop listening skills we do the following:

• Have books displayed in all areas for children to look at themselves, or for staff to read with them.
• Set times of the day for reading/singing and listening with their key person.
• Staff speak to the children regularly using appropriate language for the age of development of the children.
• Offer a library service for parents and children to borrow books to read at home.
• Provide ideas for families to borrow to promote language, imagination and attention skills.
• Encourage children to make up their own stories by asking questions.
• Learn key words of children who speak additional languages.
• Promote social skills at meal times.

A huge thank you to our parents for all of their support, both in sponsorship and supporting these key skills at home.

We hope you have enjoyed “listening” to our latest news!