Structured Activities for Language and Literacy in the Early Years.

Salley is a complete programme, which can be used as a prevention measure in the early years or as an intervention programme with older children who are having difficulties developing phonological awareness skills. It consists of 100 days of activities which are multisensory and are designed to appeal to foundation stage children. Salley starts at the very beginning by teaching listening skills and then goes through the key linguistic concepts needed to ensure a sound learning foundation for learning about phonemes. By the end of the programme, children are able to encode and decode CVC combinations – both real and non words. They are taught to discriminate syllables and individual phonemes in a step by step manner, using recurrant themes, that involves errorless learning. Children are also taught how to rhyme and sequence sounds using fun games and to develop their auditory memory skills. This approach provides the skills that children need to have firmly in place, before they embark on a phonics programme.

The programme can be delivered to groups or to individuals and has been extensively trialed. The research evidence, using control groups, showed that children who had gone through the programme made significant gains in their phonogical awareness. It is also possible to identify children at risk of dyslexia at a very young age.