Supporting Quiet Children: Book Review

Michael Jones is a well known writer and journalist. He led the Every Child a Talker initiatives in Luton, Thurrock  and Bedford. For many years he was a colleague on Special Children magazine and I have enjoyed many of his articles about speaking and listening.

Lawrence Educational have now published two of his books. Let’s Get Talking was written with Jo Belsten who led the Every Child a Talker in Bracknell Forest and Supporting Quiet Children which he wrote with Maggie Johnson, a speech and language therapist in east Kent.

We all know that children who have problems putting thoughts and feelings into words are likely to lag behind in literacy. The problems can follow them into adulthood. 60% of young people in contact with youth justice services inScotlandhave speech, language and communication needs. These two books will pave the way for success.  Both books are full of activities which educational settings and families can use to help children become good talkers.

Let’s Get Talking has activities to help children feel at ease so, for example, the authors suggest bringing items from home in a decorated shoe box. Part of this is to help bridge the gap between home and school. The rest of the activities in the book cover vocabulary development, sorting and matching activities, a little bit of role play and story times.  The book is well designed and each exercise is printed on one page so it will be easy for staff to send a photocopy home.

The second book, Supporting Quiet Children, is especially interesting to me as it focuses on reluctant talkers. Now some children are just shy and once they become comfortable in unfamiliar settings will open up and chatter but other children have more intransigent problems. Some EAL children go through a quiet phase when they are absorbing sounds and rhythms and building up their receptive language.  However, there are children who are exceptionally sensitive. When they start at nursery they may be bombarded with sounds and smells which they find disturbing so they retreat into themselves. Others are selective mutes who only feel comfortable talking in a very limited set of circumstances.

This book focuses on what nursery staff, childminders and teachers can do to help. The first piece of advice is to find ways to talk positively about children. It is all too easy to focus on the negatives but praise is a great motivator. This is linked to talking positively to the child, saying, ‘Maybe you could show me,’ not ‘I can’t help you if you won’t tell me what you want.’ There is advice on games, sharing books and using toys and pictures

The best thing about this book is that there are lots of ideas and activities. Most teachers can think of a few things to do with a child who needs to be encouraged to talk. With these two books they will have an armoury of almost a hundred tried and tested activities.

Let’s Get Talking is available from //www.lawrenceeducational.co.uk/ price £10.80

Supporting Quiet Children from the same site costs £13.