First Words Together resources

Adapted from National Literacy Trust’s Early Words Together, this programme aims to support children who may need help with communication before the age of two. The First Words Together programme builds knowledge and confidence in early years practitioners and professionals. It also develops the skills and confidence of parents and carers, enabling them to consistently support their child’s early speech, language and communication.

First Words Together programme participants: if you have received training for First Words Together, you will be able to find everything else you may need to support delivery of family sessions on this page.

If your setting is not participating, but you would like to learn more, visit our First Words Together programme page.

Resources

First Words Together training PowerPoint

You may wish to revisit the slides from the First Words Together training day, or use them to cascade the training to other staff in your setting.

First Words Together toolkit

All practitioners in the project should have received a printed version of this at training. Please contact us if you need another copy.

First Words Together Communications assets

All practitioners have access to a collection of promotional materials to use on-site or share on social media. This includes social media graphics and printable posters, as well as a Communications Toolkit that works as a guide for using these assets. We encourage you to share these on social media person to help promote your sessions.

Parent take-away sheets

At the end of each session, practitioners will provide parents with take-away sheets with key messages for supporting their child’s communication development and simple activities to try at home. These are available to photocopy in your First Words Together toolkit, but we will be adding more take-away sheets here with QR codes linked to voiceovers in community languages.

Certificate for families

The First Words Together certificate can be printed off and handed out to parents in the final session to celebrate families' achievements.

Photo permission form

As part of the project, you may want to share photos of families taking part in the sessions. Please help parents to complete the photo permissions form if you would like to send us photos of staff, parents and children in your setting.

Evaluation surveys

First Words Together is being externally evaluated by CREC. It is important to collect survey data from both practitioners and parents to pass on to CREC and we ask for your timely support with this.

Please support parents in the relevant areas to fill in the Birmingham monitoring form, North East monitoring form or Black Country monitoring form when they book on to First Words Together, before they start sessions.

In the first session, please ask parents to complete the short survey available to download and print from the available files list on this page. Once filled in, practitioners are asked to keep the surveys safe to return to parents in the last session to complete again (instructions for completion are included on the survey). This will help to see if there have been any changes for the parent or child since taking part in First Words Together.

When you have completed a cycle of First Words Together sessions, please make sure all surveys are sent to Sean Delaney at fwt@crec.co.uk

Queries

If you have any questions about First Words Together please contact us fwt@literacytrust.org.uk

Quick tips

Quick tips for parents in 17 languages

The quick tips provide parents with ideas for helping their child develop good listening and talking skills. Here you can access the quick tips in 17 different languages!