Developing Early Comprehension Skills Through Picture Book Talk: A Step-By-Step Guide for the Early Years Foundation Stage

Developing Early Comprehension Skills Through Picture Book Talk demonstrates how strategic ’picture reading’ and playful sensory learning can develop young children’s explicit and implicit comprehension skills, regardless of their decoding ability. Offering an inclusive teaching and assessment approach that aligns with the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) framework and supports the early adopter school initiative, it will help readers to guide children’s use of picture-reading-for-meaning strategies in preparation for more complex comprehension instruction in Year 1.

The book also contains useful resources such as colour picture booklets and downloadable family workshop sessions to help guide parents in more effective ’picture book talk’ at home. It offers corresponding steps for planning, teaching, and assessing children’s ’picture book talk’, multisensory learning, self-questioning skills, and early reading for meaning. The methods and activities within this book specifically help to develop:

• vocabulary (setting vocabulary, character vocabulary, general vocabulary)
• communication and language skills
• critical thinking and inference skills
• metacognition (personal learning awareness)
• self-confidence and self-regulation skills

Providing examples of practice, photocopiable resources, and step-by-step guidance for teaching key comprehension strategies and early self-regulation skills, this book is essential reading for all those who work with young children and wish to encourage a love of reading.

Donna Thomson is a primary reading skills specialist, researcher, and educational author with a background in SEN, reading recovery and early literacy skills development. She is also the founder of Think2Read, an e-learning not-for-profit platform which offers primary schools early inference skills teaching and assessment provision for all abilities.