S8 E2 - 5 Early Years Practices That Deserve a Comeback: Part 1

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Hi there. Welcome back to the Structured Literacy Podcast recorded here in Pataway Burnie on the lands of the Palawa people. I intended for this episode to be one single episode, but it turns out that I had so much to say about this particular topic that the episode ran way too long. So what you're about to hear is part one, which covers the first two things that I think that we could be bringing back into our early years classrooms. And in the next episode, we're going to cover the rest of them. So I hope you enjoy this part one of 5 Early Years Practices That Deserve a Comeback, I'll see you at the end.

If you're listening to this during the holidays, I hope you are somewhere comfortable with a cup of tea and that nobody is asking you where the glue sticks are. Our last episode was a meaty one about making sense of the phonics screening check results you may have just received. If you missed it, add it to your listening queue for when you're back at school and ready to think about data again. In this episode, I wanted to give you something a little bit lighter and maybe even a little bit fun.

Why Oral Language Is Slipping

Whenever I sit down with early years teachers, the conversation turns to oral language. Teachers always tell me that the children arriving in Foundation in that first formal year of school have lower levels of language than the teachers have ever seen. They describe children who find it hard to follow a simple instruction, to put a sentence together to ask for what they need, or to tell a friend about something that's happened. The national data points us in this same direction. Every three years, schools participate in the AEDC, it provides a snapshot of the developmental status of children in their first full-time year of school across five domains. One of those domains is communication and general knowledge.

In 2024, 288,483 children were included in the data collection, with 24% of children developmentally vulnerable or at risk in communication skills and general knowledge. That's a quarter of the children in this country with a communication and general knowledge challenge. When we break this down by demographic, about 35% of students from diverse language backgrounds are either at risk or developmentally vulnerable. That number is a smidge higher for First Nations children. When we put these findings alongside what teachers are seeing in their classrooms every day, it's clear that many of our younger students need support to develop communication and language skills.

Program Vs Classroom Practices

Now, when schools are worried about something, our instinct is often to go looking for a program. And sometimes a program is exactly what's needed. But today I'd like to wonder aloud about something different. What if the answer to supporting language challenges at the Tier 1 level isn't a new program at all? What if it's a return to some of the early childhood practices that we have let go of in recent years? Is it possible that we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater in early years teaching?

Keeping Explicit Teaching With Joy

Over the last several years, a great many schools have been through enormous shifts in how we teach children to read. Most of that change has been for the better. Children are being taught the code explicitly and systematically. Far few are being asked to guess words from pictures, and teachers are building knowledge about how reading works that would have been hard to imagine 10 years ago. I, for one, am really proud of what our profession has done. But when schools go through big changes, something else tends to happen as well. Practices get swept up in the clean out that probably didn't deserve to go. Somewhere along the way, teachers heard that big books were a balanced literacy thing, that dramatic play was taking time away from instruction, that puppets were a bit fluffy for a serious classroom. Now, nobody ever wrote a policy banning these things, they just simply stopped appearing. And in a lot of classrooms, they never came back.

For experienced teachers, this may not even have been a conscious choice, but rather a response to there not being enough time for them anymore in amongst all the explicit teaching. The explicit teaching is great and it needs to stay. But what if there was a way we could keep the explicit teaching and bring back the goodness of the olden days? This is the power of and. We can be structured and playful. We can be explicit and joyful. We don't have to choose, and these things don't even have to sit in different lessons.

Age-Appropriate Pegagogies

If you're working in a Queensland school, you might be familiar with age-appropriate pedagogies. Part of this is the outlining of 11 characteristics of instruction that can be used with an appropriate range and balance depending on the age of the children and the goals you're trying to achieve. In my former life as a small school principal, we embraced this idea that the 11 characteristics could be used with an appropriate range used with an appropriate balance depending on the goals in front of us. It was actually pretty wonderful. We got all the benefits of knowledge-rich, explicit teaching right across the curriculum and had space to remember that we teach children. That feels like a really good episode for another time, so I'll get back to today's topic.

Big Books For Print And Talk

Number one, on my list of things that I think we've thrown out with the bathwater is big books. The reality is that in many schools, the big books and the easel that they sat on are probably stacked or shoved into a storeroom somewhere collecting dust. Just because explicit teaching of the code came into our classrooms, it doesn't mean that everything we did in the 90s and the noughties was bad, including big books in the early years classroom. The need for students to learn concepts of print hasn't gone anywhere. Children still need to learn that we read words rather than the pictures, that print runs from left to right and top to bottom, that there are spaces between words, and that a book has a front and a back, and there are covers and title pages, and a big book makes all of that visible to a whole class at once. They're also typically written to be short and engaging and to invite children to join in. I can still hear my students saying, "The mice are in the kitchen, get them, get them, get them." And who doesn't love a little bit of Mrs. Wishy-Washy?

Children joined in in the same way that children at home join in with their favourite stories. When they chime in with a repeated refrain, they're practicing the rhythm and structure of language. They're part of a shared experience with their classmates, and even the children who rarely speak up in other parts of the day have a go. The purpose here is taking part in language rather than decoding, and children learn a great deal from it. And when we muck around with that language and get a little bit playful, we're actually addressing a content descriptor from the curriculum, and it's this: Explore and replicate the rhythms and sound patterns of literary texts such as poems, rhymes, and songs. We'll come back to those rhymes in a moment.

Big books came to Australian classrooms largely through the work of Don Holdaway, he was from New Zealand, who shared book experiences as being designed to recreate the closeness of the bedtime story for the whole class. Because they became so closely tied to whole language practice and to predictable texts, a lot of schools have sort of really put them aside or thrown them out as they cleared out the levelled readers. What needed to change was what we asked children to do with the book and what we expected they'd get out of it. What really needed to stay was the books themselves.

National Early Literacy Panel

The National Early Literacy Panel from 2008 found that book sharing produced moderate effects on young children's print knowledge and oral language. The panel also found that concepts about print had a moderate relationship with later reading. It's clear, though, that shared reading on its own isn't enough, particularly for children at risk who also need explicit teaching of phonological awareness and letter knowledge. Now, all of this fits beautifully with the power of and. The big book does a different job from the phonics lesson and from the book you use in your text-based unit. And all of these jobs matter and have a place.

There's also some good evidence for print referencing where the teacher deliberately draws children's attention to features of print while reading aloud. And of course, having as many opportunities for students to engage with lovely picture books, not just big books, is really important. Montag and colleagues found that picture books contain a wider range of words than the everyday speech children hear around them, which makes shared reading one of the most accessible sources of vocabulary learning we have. Now there's no suggestion that reading aloud to children replaces any of the other work, but research has shown that reading aloud, particularly when that reading is interactive with the children participating in a variety of ways, is shown that this is really beneficial for language development and learning concepts of print.

Making Shared Reading Interactive

So if you're bringing big books back, and I really hope you do, choose ones with rich language and a refrain that children can join in with. Track the print with your finger or a pointer as you read. Stop and notice where we start reading on the page, or stop and find the letter that we're learning this week. None of this is teaching children phonics in context. It's about building in opportunities for reps and concept development in many different ways. But make sure you build in plenty of turn and talk to a partner about the story. That interactivity bit is really important. Not only is it better for learning, but it helps focus the children's attention.

You can reread the book across the week so that children have time to become familiar with it, because the second and third reading is where many children start to join in with confidence. And of course, keep your decodable text doing their job within your literacy block. That is also so important.

Puppets As A Reason To Speak

Number two on the list is the humble puppet. And you might be surprised to hear that I have a real soft spot for puppets. Now I know, I know, it sounds like a bit of flim flam nonsense to use puppets in the classroom, but hear me out. A puppet gives children a meaningful and authentic reason to speak and to listen. That's something that's really easy to lose in a big, busy classroom where so much of the talk children hear is instruction and so much of what they say is an answer to a teacher's question. When a puppet asks a question, children are talking to someone who wants to know.

Linking the puppet to a storybook or a text-based unit makes it even better. When you want students to practice retelling a story as part of their unit, the puppet can tell the story and get parts of it wrong for the children to fix. Or two students can create a conversation between their puppets about the text. I'm not talking about two students at the front of the room while everybody watches passively. I'm talking about every child having a puppet of some description that they use as the intermediary for the conversation. Not only is it a little bit fun, which captures students' attention, but it helps them to connect a whole lot of learning. They can be talking to each other and asking questions about, what did the character do? What would you have done? For shy students, this can really take the pressure off enormously because the puppet is doing the talking. Now, I've used puppets in my own classroom to practice turn taking in asking and answering questions, and I've used them for story retell. And that retelling bit really matters.

In my book, I refer to a meta-analysis by Swanson and colleagues from 2011, which found that language and literature-rich teaching leads to moderate to high gains in reading outcomes for children at risk of difficulty, especially when the storytelling was handed over to the children during the instruction. It's not just that there is storytelling happening, it's that the children are engaged and involved. Puppets are also a wonderful way to capture children's attention without a screen. My favourite was a big fluffy orangutan. Now, there was nothing better to grab my students' attention than the orangutan coming out and whispering in my ear. The whole room would go silent, desperate to know what he'd said. And he loved singing songs with the class too. Oh, so many songs.

There Isn't Research...

Now, I'll be up front, I haven't found a body of research on puppets specifically, and I'm not going to pretend that there is one. What I can tell you is that a puppet can be a wonderful delivery tool, and that can really matter when working with five-year-olds. And while our job is not to be a children's entertainer, we do need to remember that we teach children, and five-year-olds are not small 10-year-olds or small 15-year-olds, they are five-year-olds. 

Using Puppets Without Losing Time

This is especially important to remember when we are all noticing that it can be harder and harder to capture students' attention. The trick is that the puppet or any other tool must serve the learning. You may have heard me talk about Dehaene's four pillars. Focus student attention, ensure engagement in thinking, as in, children are thinking about what we want them to think about, provide feedback and ensure consolidation. If it takes five minutes to warm up and tell jokes every time the puppet comes out, well you've lost instructional time and done a great job of distracting children from the learning at hand. But if it pops out for two minutes to help children retell a story, that could be time really well spent, especially if you see greater engagement and participation than you did without it.

That brings us to the end of part one of this current episode, 5 Early Years Practices That Deserve a Comeback. In the next episode, next week, I'll be sharing number three, four, and five with you. Make sure you come back and have a listen.

Thanks so much. Happy teaching.

Show Notes:

Australian Early Development Census. (2024). https://www.aedc.gov.au/data-hub/public-data/2024-aedc-results

National Early Literacy Panel. (2008). https://www.nichd.nih.gov/sites/default/files/publications/pubs/documents/NELPReport09.pdf

Montag, Jessica & Jones, Michael. (2015). The Words Children Hear: Picture Books and the Statistics for Language Learning. Psychological Science. 26. 1489-1496. 10.1177/0956797615594361.

Tran, L., Sanchez, T., Arellano, B., & Lee Swanson, H. (2011). A Meta-Analysis of the RTI Literature for Children at Risk for Reading Disabilities. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 44(3), 283-295. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219410378447

Dehaene, S. (2020). How We Learn: The New Science of Education and the Brain. Penguin Books.  9780241366462.