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addition to these crucial day-to-day texts, non-fiction covers a huge range of different types of texts including instructional texts (fairy cake recipes), persua-sive texts (advert for delicious, delectable dainty cakes), explanatory texts (the history of cake making), recounts (my first birthday cake . . .).

The role of the Early Years educator in a creative classroom is to support this interaction with non-fictional texts by:

Creative Teaching:English in the Early Years and Primary Classroom

● encouraging the child’s natural inquisitiveness

● enabling the child to frame questions

● supporting the child in searching for possible answers

● allowing the time and opportunity to explore and question the information

● sharing any findings

● celebrating the process of enquiry.

This cycle (importantly, beginning in no particular order) builds on the crucial work developed by Lewis and Wray (1998) refined in their EXIT model and disseminated by the National Literacy Strategy. This chapter looks at practical ways to engage children creatively with a range of non-fictional texts in order to deepen their understanding and enjoyment of discovery.

Building on home literacy

The very first texts that a baby will encounter will very often be those everyday vital forms of communication. The young child will begin to recognise the packet of their favourite cereal, they will recognise the logo on a piece of clothing, they will dance to the theme music and point to the titles of a familiar TV programme, they will pick up a mobile phone and ‘talk’ in a range of voices and registers. They are in fact demonstrating a competence and confidence in accessing non-fictional texts and thereby making sense of the world around them. Young children born in the 21st century are frequently sophisticated users of technology-based informa-tion and multimodal texts, in particular – sometimes more confident than the adults working in their setting. Children of two and three years old using DVD players to watch their favourite programmes or reading and writing e-mails or mobile phone text messages are not unusual occurrences. The children are used to using a rapidly expanding cache of communication tools in order to access and pass on information.

And yet, as children enter our nurseries and reception classes, the overwhelm-ing emphasis is upon telloverwhelm-ing, readoverwhelm-ing and writoverwhelm-ing fictional stories. The majority of picture-books tell a story; the end of each session is usually incomplete without the adult reading a story; the book corner is vividly promoting stories and fictional

accounts through posters, pictures, toys and, of course, the bright and engaging colours and images on the covers of the books themselves.

In order to extend and complement the young child’s interaction with non-fictional texts, it is vital to consider ways of bridging the home and school experiences by developing our understanding of the children’s interests and competencies outside the classroom. Consider the following activities as a way of ensuring and developing a meaningful dialogue between home and school:

Home ‘literacy’ diary

If we go back to this idea discussed in the Early Years fiction chapter – we can see the enormous range of non-fictional language and literacy activities Zac, aged 3, is engaging with, even before 9 o’clock in the morning:

Teaching non-fiction creatively in the Early Years

● selecting his cereal from the cupboard

● checking e-mails with mum

● practising writing his name on the computer

● looking at the CBeebies website

● searching for the letters in his name on car number plates

● reading shop signs.

Asking parents and carers to note down a ‘literacy’ diary for just one day can be enormously enlightening for staff in the Early Years setting and can give some good ideas for tapping into children’s own interests and aptitudes as well as illuminating the breadth of the literacy curriculum at home as well as in school.

My favourite things

Ask children with the help of parents and carers to keep a scrapbook or sketchbook of their favourite things – pictures of special toys taken from cata-logues, photos of pets and family members, wrappers from sweets or delicious foods, birthday cards, postcards, tickets from outings and journeys and so on.

Children can add to these books at home and school and should become unique to each child. These books often become a child’s most prized possession as they share it with family at home and friends at school and can provide an excel-lent record of a child’s interests and enthusiasms as well as a powerful early reading book.

Travelling Teddy

Many Early Years classrooms have a treasured teddy, doll, benign monster or other beloved stuffed animal. This classroom friend must be treated as a most special

and much desired addition to the class by adults and children alike in order to generate the enthusiasm and interest necessary to keep this activity going so that all the children who want to can participate in turn. Each week the teddy must pack its tiny bag or suitcase with help from the children (complete with a range of communication tools including items such as a diary, camera, blank stamped postcard, scrapbook and passport) and then travel home with one of the children (it must be a volunteer) for the week. The class should agree on the expectation of this visit: a video diary perhaps or a postcard sent from the child’s home telling the class about their week (with help from the child’s family, of course) or a few snap-shots to go in Teddy’s scrapbook or even a daily e-mail. Each week the class could welcome Teddy back and the host child could be encouraged to share their adven-tures. It can be a great opportunity to encourage the children to introduce words and phrases from other languages into the diary or scrapbook and to celebrate the diversity of events in the children’s lives. The important element here is to ensure effective communication between the home and the setting and to allow the child an opportunity to share home activities in school. It is also an excellent routine to support and extend children’s ability to recount to an audience.