Nursery World - Learning & Development - Practitioner Role: Part 4

Some essential principles should guide conversations with children, says Julie Fisher in part four of her series on adult roles in early learning.

Perhaps the greatest challenge for practitioners is not in starting a conversation with young children but in keeping it going. Having a sustained and shared conversation seems to be difficult, because so often the child and the adult want different things from the conversation and have different purposes for starting that conversation in the first place.

For the child, the conversation is often started for emotional reasons. They want reassurance or praise, they want to be noticed and they want attention. Even the youngest baby is trying to make an emotional connection with their key carer, to have gaze and smiles and sounds reciprocated and shared. These are very basic human instincts and once the child's emotional needs are met, the child usually feels more confident to let the 'conversation' move on. However, while many early childhood educators are very good at being responsive to these emotional overtures, they can sometimes be tempted to move the conversation on, in order to achieve their own purposes rather than those of the child.

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