Listening and attention prompts This is a useful prompt to ensure that Listening and attention is covered and taught effectively towards the 40-60 month age band. www.earlybirdyeducation.com

Listening and attention Plan lots of ‘speaking and listening’ sessions whereby children must listen to others ideas and opinions. Encourage children to question each other and plan lots of opportunity for children to mix with a wide variety of peers to heighten their listening and attention. For independent learning set up listening areas with different story CDs, musical instruments, recorded questions and listening bag. Provide lots of role play stimulus off familiar stories and traditional tales e.g. puppets, props and costumes. Encourage children to act out a narrative and act out what they know. Introduce unfamiliar stories and a wide variety of text to encourage children to think about a text ad predict what may happen next. This will help develop early inference skills and help children to unpick and understand a text in more depth. Provide exciting resources and activities in the setting to create optimum engagement. Extend learners by setting challenges e.g. can you make a car out of the Lego? This will built up their attention span and encourage focus. Listening and attention Maintains attentions, concentrates and sits quietly during appropriate activity. Two-channelled attentions- can listen and do for a short span. Ensure a daily phonics session is being taught. Start phonics with the transition from phase 1 into phase 2. Remember not all children have been to nursery so they will not have been exposed to phase 1. Phase 1 is an integral part of listening. www.earlybirdyeducation.com