BEST PRACTICE
Unpacking the Supporting Multilingual Children and Families toolkit
The Alliance launches a new toolkit to support multilingual families with English as an additional language
The Toolkit is sponsored by Polylino, a multilingual digital picture book service for early years settings.
While engaging with families is a key element of any quality early years provision, it can present a challenge for providers when families and educators speak different languages. However, by adopting a proactive approach, settings can build positive, long-lasting relationships with families who are multilingual or speaking and learning English as an additional language.
The Alliance’s new Supporting Multilingual Children and Families Toolkit has been created to facilitate this process, ensuring that all educators feel confident in working with and supporting multilingual families.
The toolkit aims to support early years settings delivering provision to multilingual families or those who are speaking and learning English as an additional language. This will aid communication between settings and multilingual families, as well as recognising and amplifying the unique skills of children who speak more than one language.
It includes:
- a comprehensive Best Practice Guide, which is underpinned by the principles of the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) Framework and contains information, advice and guidance on a wide range of practical topics – including settling in children who are new to English-speaking settings, the stages of early multilingual learning, and how to prepare your provision to support multilingual families
- a one-hour virtual consultation with one of the Alliance’s early years experts: this is a reflective conversation that will support you to navigate through the guide, focusing on the essential elements of supporting multilingual children and families.
The Supporting Multilingual Children and Families Toolkit is priced at £75 for Alliance members or £120 for non-members and can be ordered here: bit.ly/EALtoolkitEYA.
Upon purchasing the Toolkit, providers will be contacted by a member of the Alliance team who will work with them to arrange a suitable time for their consultation and provide access to the Best Practice Guide and supporting resources.