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This practical book, packed with advice and ideas will be invaluable for all practitioners helping children on their journey from mark making to early writing. Michael Jones explores the key role that talking and language development play in helping children to become capable and confident as emergent writers. The book provides a valuable explanation of how children develop their writing skills, together with plenty of tried-and-tested ideas to help children develop key skills. These include gross and fine motor control, visual scanning, recognition of shapes, patterns and direction, and a comfortable pencil grip. 50pp, A4.
Other award-winning books by Michael Jones include Supporting Quiet Children, Let’s Get Talking! and Let’s Talk About Maths!
EYFS Forum website –
“We very much liked the clear explanations on the ‘Introduction’ and ‘Important ideas’ pages. They made the book accessible, understandable and relevant to all readers; whether they were experienced practitioners or new staff working with children for the first time. Following his excellent explanations of the theories behind the importance of adults supporting children’s early writing skills, Jones provides a wealth of ideas and practical suggestions to enthuse and motivate staff to provide the best possible writing environments and experiences for children. Throughout the book Jones gives examples and suggestions for both very young, and older children. This differentiation makes it easy for practitioners to support any age of child and also enables them to plan effectively to support children with additional needs. We would definitely recommend this book for any professional practice library in any early years provision.”
Kelly Yuen, 0-3yrs Learning and Development Officer –
“This book has reaffirmed lots of the practice I promote as an advisor to early years. It is filled with practical activity ideas and includes key vocabulary adults can model to the children engaged in the activities, all written in a simple-to-follow style. It will greatly support any early years provision with their planning. It will help them to assess whether a child is ready for writing. If not, it suggests lots of ideas to support children to effectively reach this stage in fun playful ways, whilst giving adults the confidence that they are still helping children with the process of learning to write.”
Abbie Rainbow-Dias, Foundation Teacher –
“A lovely book, full of ideas to help practitioners and parents. I love how it shows the way we can ‘feed’ children vocabulary while they are busy with their hands. Colleagues in Year 1 are pinching it to look for ideas to support the new children learning English as an additional language.”
Smart Talkers – Amazon Review –
“There is lot of confusion in the area of mark making and how to encourage it, which Michael Jones aims to clarify in this excellent book. Michael is originally a Speech and Language Therapist then teacher, advisory teacher, trainer and Early Language Consultant for the Every Child a Talker (ECaT) project. He has written this book to help improve understanding among early years’ practitioners and parents of how children’s handprints and smearing, painting and drawing and language development are linked to early writing. There is often a link between early speech and language delay and later difficulties with reading and writing. This book will be invaluable for all early years practitioners, to understand the approaches and what they should understand about early mark making and writing, as part of their knowledge of the EYFS. I highly recommend this book to settings and parents of children with speech and language delay. It will also be useful for Speech and language therapists, who will almost certainly meet older children with speech and language difficulties, who will need help with early writing. It doesn’t pretend to be an academic book but like all Michael Jones’ books is definitely a very practical resource! It’s really easy to read and even has photocopiable pages.”