It's all about stories!: Building Vocabulary

Unfortunately, there are many children in the Early Years age group who have delayed communication and language development. And one of the easiest things for all of us to help children with is building vocabulary.

We can do this everyday just by using talk, commenting on what we are doing, where we are going, what's going to happen next and what we might be having for lunch or a snack.

But we can also use books to help build vocabulary. And I don't even mean reading stories. There are so many great picture books, illustrated by amazing illustrators, with so many things on the pages to spot and talk about.

We really like Usborne First Picture board books - there's a word book and one called Trucks that we really like at the moment. In quiet times we sit down in a small group or one-to-one and look at the pictures. We comment on and talk about what we can see.

One day, when the children were choosing what to do, one of them picked up the Argos catalogue. I left them to it and watched quietly from the other side of the room. Soon she had a whole gang of children sitting around her, and they were all looking at the toy pages (yes, they had very easily managed to find the right page in a book that's hundreds of pages long!). The conversation was brilliant. They were chatting about which toys they liked, which they really wanted, which they already had. One said "You would love that wouldn't you, you really like spiderman...". So there we go, using a free catalogue is great for building vocabulary too!