The Welcome Big book of ideas is full of ideas to have fun and support children’s speech, language and communication development. The activities are all based on the best science. These ideas will help support a child’s emotional social development through play with their carers in a setting.

It’s really useful because it gives you lots of ideas and lots of activities that you can then use to help that child to progress.

In this video & article, we’ll show you how to use the Big Book of Ideas, which really support the language development for the children you care for. Remember, you can always step up or step down the ideas to suit a child’s developmental needs. Let’s look at a few ideas as to how it could work.

“Joint attention” is essential if children are going to learn new words and develop their language and communication skills. “Joint attention” is when children become aware of where adults are looking and they look at the same thing too. Pointing is an obvious first step. Point at something interesting for the child and encourage them to look at it.

You can step this activity up by using less pointing, encouraging the child to follow your gaze to things further away, or being less obvious with your gaze. You can step this activity down by pointing to the object as you look at it, and pointing could even begin by touching the object and then moving your fingers away a few centimetres.

Don’t put the object too far away from the child. Move the object slightly to encourage looking.

What’s really important to remember is that when you’re using the Big Book of Ideas, you really needed to screen the children first using the Welcome screening tool. This will tell you exactly where the children are up to developmentally with speech and language. You can then plan the right activities at the right level for the children. Just use your own initiative and step up the activity or step the activity down in ways that we’ve described in this video.