Early Years (Expressive Arts And Communication Skills) Hub

Main aims of the project in 2019 - 20

Communication skills are crucial to young children’s overall development. Being able to speak clearly and process speech sounds, to understand others, to express ideas and interact with others are fundamental building blocks for a child’s development. A wealth of research asserts that good communication, language and literacy at a young age have the highest correlation with outcomes at school:

At the age of 5 children from the most advantaged groups are over a year ahead in vocabulary, compared to those from disadvantaged backgrounds (Millennium Cohort Study)
By the age of 3, children from privileged families have heard 30 million more words than children from underprivileged backgrounds (Hart and Risely, “The Early Catastrophe: the 30 Million Word Gap)

Exploration of expressive arts emphasises the process and teaches children, in a world that is product driven, that the method by which you arrive at the destination is as significant as the destination itself. High quality expressive arts experiences impact positively on confidence, self-esteem, personal, social, emotional development, behaviour, breaking down language barriers, reduced inequality and increase creativity.

Our Aim is to:

Combine these two important curriculum experiences and extend our range of skills to promote them further
Extend our knowledge about the importance of these areas
Build on our skills to encourage and teach Expressive Arts in order to promote learning
Broaden children’s vocabulary, in particular with an expectation that achievement in literacy will be improved.

Want to get involved?

Activities planned for this year include:

Welcome goody bag of resources

Explore the research linking expressive arts (creativity), language acquisition and improvements in literacy outcomes.

Plan how to disseminate the group work beyond the confines of our Hub

Workshops with creative artists

Plan for creative expression as a constant principle in the EYFS

Creativity day based in a London setting

What does the Hub plan to achieve and what resources will be created?

An overall focus on expressive Arts, Communication, Language and Literacy will build on Literacy skills.
We want Early Years in Camden to reflect the excellent work we are seeing; sharing the end result. A portfolio of good practice which can be used to showcase this to other practitioners and a wider audience.