Birth to three matters - Communities and Local Government

attend and concentrate. The evaluationof the PEEP (Peers Early EducationPartnership) programme, another projectwhich encourages parents to share bookswith their children from a very early age,is already showing differences in thereading abilities of the children at school,following their own and their parents’involvement in the project (Evangelouand Sylva 2002).Nowadays young children ‘make sense’of their print dependent society throughmeaning making involving a range ofmedia (Westbrook 1999). Sam (one ofpremature twin boys aged 15 months) wasenthralled to be dressed in his older brother’s‘hand-me-down’ Postman Pat pyjamasinstead of a baby’s sleep suit. For the nextfew days he re pe a te d ly brought Postman Pa tbooks from among their collection to hismother, to delight in and share the picturesand have her tell the stories (abridgedversions of the text where the print provedtoo long),and he wanted to watch theirPostman Pat video.SUMMARY OF KEY ‘MESSAGES’Human beings communicate in numerousways. Language is said to form only a smallpercentage of interaction. Children arekeen observers of all forms ofcommunication, both in order to makesense of what is going on and to be ableto participate. Practitioners need to reflecton their observations of the children’scommunications and their own ability tomake these possible for all children, andparticularly those who might be silencedbecause they are not being encouraged touse their first language or because theyhave a hearing loss.The Framework Component MakingMeaning provides the following essentialpoints about how babies and childrenstrive to convey and interpret meaningsas skilful communicators.From the very beginning of life, youngbabies convey messages about whatthey want and need, as well as howthey feel.Babies learn that their voice and actionshave effects on others and they strive toshare meanings.Young children use actions and wordsto make and justify choices andinfluence the behaviour and responsesof others.As vocabulary increases, children makesense of the world through bargaining,negotiating, questioning, describingand labelling.Thus it is during these first three years thatyoung children begin to understand thatlanguage is not just about being able touse words but how and when to use them,because they have also come to know a lotabout the culture in which their family lifeis embedded and in which each of themlives. According to Bruner (1983) youngchildren understand culturally appropriaterequests, invitations, and linguistic forms –learning how to get things done and to beaccepted in that particular culture.82 EDUCATION ANDSKILLS B I RT H T O T H R E E M AT T E R S