Talk To Your Baby: Early Years Conference

Talk To Your Baby is our annual conference with a focus on language acquisition in the first 1001 days, and a key strand of our early years activity. The conference is a cross-sector summit of thought leadership and best practice, with speakers from academia, policy and public health. The aim of the conference is to advance the discussion around how to improve children's reading, writing and speaking skills and enhance the life chances of future generations.

The National Literacy Trust has a long history of working in the early years sector, directly changing childrens' lives through literacy. Below is a small selection of our work. Remember you can always contact us to find out more.

Early Words Together

Our flexible and evidence based Early Words Together programme is designed to improve literacy skills with families in a nursery setting. Proven to improve children's language development and parental engagement, this programme has been stringently evaluated and implemented across the country.

We have also developed Early Words Together at 2, Early Words Together at 3 and Early Words Together for Multilingual Families. The best way to find out more is to get in touch with the team.

Hungry Little Minds

Hungry Little Minds forms part of our home learning environment initiative, run with the Department for Education (DfE). The project aims to address need within the most disadvantaged communities in England. Children from these communities start primary school with a vocabulary 19 months behind their peers, a gap most will never recover from.

Hungry Little Minds works to combat this issue through local events where volunteers model chat, play and read activities from our Words for Life website for parents and families. Here, families can also sign up for our Words for Life newsletter which suggests a new activity each month to try out, as well as providing a further nudge towards doing these activities more often as part of their day-to-day routine.

HELLO improvement framework

The HELLO self-report and improvement framework can be used by practitioners and settings to review their own practices and implement positive changes to their communication, language and literacy provision. The framework focuses on three key areas, partnerships with parents, skilled practitioners and enabling environments.

For more information, read the final report from HELLO in Manchester.

Multilingual resources

Our series of bilingual quick tips, in 19 different languages, is helpful for parents and early years practitioners to help children develop good talking and listening skills.

If the language you need isn’t listed, we have created a blank template for each topic so that you can adapt it to the desired language.

We've also developed the Time Together booklet, translated in to a wide range of languages, for practitioners to share with multilingual families in their setting or community. The booklet provides a colourful and easy-to-read guide that is full of suggestions for how parents can support their young child's learning at home.