We reached the end of our first year of Once Upon A Time in June this year and came out with some fascinating results.

In the early part of the year our children undertook an assessment of their vocabulary and oral narrative skills. This assessment was completed by our Speech and Language Therapist using the Renfrew Word Finding Test and the Renfrew Bus Story Assessment respectively and formed a baseline for the measurement of the project.

 

As you can see from the charts above a substantial proportion of our cohort were scoring below the expected range for both vocabulary and oral narrative at the start of the year and it was the anticipation of this picture which prompted the creation of the project.

After 8 months of Once Upon A Time sessions, to address the oral narrative element, alongside Word Boost sessions aimed at addressing the vocabulary gap, the children underwent the same assessment.

As you can see from the charts the project had a huge impact on oral narrative skills. We went from 61% of our children scoring below the expected range for oral storytelling to, 8 months later,  79% scoring within or above the expected range.

The 21% who remained below the expected range still made significant progress during that time but did not make it in to the expected range for their chronological age – in most cases this was due to other known factors including additional support needs.

There were also gains across the board in terms of vocabulary development.

Whilst there were a smaller percentage of children moving into the the ‘expected range’ bracket it it is worth drilling down a little, into the gains made during the 8 month period.

As you can see from the chart on the right – 62% of children made more than 8 months progress with their vocabulary during this 8 month period – their individual starting point was what determined whether that progress led them into the expected range.

However I felt that, in the second year of the project, vocabulary was still an area which we could develop and make greater gains.

For the coming year I have created a new improved version of the project with an added vocabulary element.  It focuses particularly on common words which will assist the children with sentence construction both when speaking and ultimately when writing and which will support their early progress in reading.

The infographic below outlines the structure of the project for the coming year. We focus on each book for 2 weeks with 2 Once Upon A Time sessions per week and related play provision across that fortnight. I can’t wait to see how the new improved version supports the development of our cohort this year. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments below!