...especially in the first three years of life.
The NEXT Foundation have made a generous gift to New Zealand funding an initiative called Talking Matters - a campaign to promote the importance of communicating with babies in their first 1,000 days.
For years our teachers have been aware of the significant negative impact on children who arrive at our Decile 1 schools having heard 30 million less spoken words than their fortunate peers in suburbs not too far down the road. They spend their life playing catch-up. We work hard to accelerate learning with highly effective teaching strategies and try not to focus on the wistful thought that we are starting 5 years too late!
We are delighted to hear that a group are taking action. Watch Talking Matters Director Alison Sutton talk about this exciting initiative to educate parents about the importance of talking to babies and immersing them in conversation, songs and rhymes - as well as reading to them.
You can watch a further video where Prof Stuart McNaughton comments on the significance of this initiative.
Alison Sutton on Talking Matters for NEXT Foundation from
Nicola Smith on
Vimeo.
A significant component of our Manaiakalani projects is to increase our students' oracy, but we all struggle with the issue of getting enough quiet spaces in a busy school to record the quantity of work the students are producing. So anything that simplifies the technical process has got to be of huge benefit. I've seen the Easi-Speak mic at a few trade stands over the past year, and seen teachers saying it is great on Twitter, so I finally got around to ordering two and they arrived today. I went down the corridor and asked for a volunteer student to come and play with it and 'show' me how to use it. There is no learning curve with recording, and the USB connection to the computer is easy as well. We experimented with a few applications to drag and drop it into (Garage Band, iMovie, Hyperstudio, Keynote and Quicktime Pro) and it worked like a charm. Go and have a listen to Jarna's recording of one of her blog posts, or listen to me ramble on below... (I took the footage with the Flip Video, so a bit one-handed and wobbly...). The first mic walked out of my office at 3pm with Jarna's teacher - I don't think I'll be seeing that again in a hurry!
