Early Development Groups

For our youngest members, toddlers up to the pre-school years, Raising Twenty1 hosts monthly Early Development Groups facilitated by LETS Go! These sessions teach children a wide range of skills to help them meet their developmental milestones and provide a firm foundation for further learning.

Each Early Development Group lasts for about an hour and includes discussion of targets and activities for every child in attendance, and 40-45 minutes of interesting activities building confidence and ability across key social, linguistic and numeracy skills.

Targets to work towards between sessions are identified to help members keep up the good work at home. We aim to provide a service that’s both effective and really fun for your child.

We ask for a voluntary contribution for members to attend the Early Development Groups, but this is not mandatory.

Skills We Work On In Early Development Groups

Communication

Special attention is paid to the development of pre-linguistic skills to help children strengthen their ability to communicate. Skills targeted include: eye contact, joint attention, non-verbal communication, use of gesture, use of context and ability to maintain topic.

Receptive Vocabulary & Language

Inline with the development of each child and their vocabulary, language targets will be incorporated into sessions and include; following 2, 3 and then 4 key word phrases using a variety of constructions (e.g. action-object, object-possession, agent-action-object); understanding of grammatical markers (e.g. 'ing ' possessive 's', plural 's').

Numbers

We enjoy many props to demonstrate early number concepts and their accompanying vocabulary. We introduce the concepts of size, shape, comparatives, more/less as well as rote counting, numeral recognition, 1-1 correspondence, stable order and the introduction of Numicon.

Memory

Early Development Groups include many fun activities to support attention and listening with supportive visual and verbal memory strategies.

Speech

Good speaking starts with listening. Children are encouraged to listen and discriminate sounds before we start with the production of symbolic sounds, single sounds, sound combinations, use of sounds in words, connected speech, syllable marking, intonation, rate and stress, intelligibility and clarity.

Expressive Vocabulary & Grammar

For children who achieve receptive targets, expressive targets include: single vocabulary word production (including spoken words and sign) covering a range of syntactic categories including nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions and early pronouns, prepositions.

Reading

Working on the understanding children with Down’s Syndrome have visual learning strengths, we prioritise sight word recognition as well as letter sound knowledge, early reading comprehension and early phonic skills including early blending and segmenting.

Developing Play

Play is fun and so much more. We encourage children to enjoy themselves so much they are unaware of how much they are leaning about social skills and independence, turn taking, sharing, co-operation and attention. They are supporting in listening skills and persuaded to request and initiate games.