Elklan debrief

This term I've had the great opportunity to attend the Elklan Language Builders course. Tonight was the last session and I have taken a lot away from it. I've found that most of it was stuff I already knew was important but it has been reiterated with really practical ideas to implement it. I've got new strategies to try to develop language at all levels. I've got some baselines for what students should be doing with their language at different ages and therefore when you should be looking at an intervention.

The biggest thing that has been reiterated is just how important these base skills are before students can be expected to read and write successfully. As a consequence of this I'd really like to complete some teacher inquiry around this area. I plan to start with a group next term where I have a much larger focus on learning phonological awareness, building oral language, reading to, handwriting, story telling/sequencing, letter-sound knowledge rather than actual reading and writing texts.
I am thinking of creating shared stories about experiences that they've had or repeated reading of simple books for them to take home.

Next year I would like to start my class off with only phonological, oral language, reading to, handwriting, storytelling/sequencing and letter-sound knowledge with no readers or written text for possibly the first term. I think it will be extremely interesting to see how these students track compared to this year's cohort after 1 year at school.
Challenges I think I will face in convincing parents that it's ok for their students not to be bringing home readers every day. Also our term 1 data would look poor as students will not be achieving running records or writing sample results. I also wonder at what point to I move children on. If they have very good phonological awareness and oral language do I put them into more formal reading and writing more quickly. Do I need an assessment that determines when they move into the more formal work or do I go off a gut feeling and then how do I manage it?

Currently I am trying to do everything  - and I can't fit it all in. So I think this will be much better.

I've now also got a few students that I would like to refer to SLT as I know recognise that they may need some specialised help. The challenge is that we currently don't have a full time SLT and often they give us more to do and it's very hard to fit it all in.