Keri Finlayson – författare

Following the recommendations of the recent Ofsted report ''Are you Ready?'' and reflecting the findings of the Rose Review and the Tickel Review, The Little Book of Building Vocabulary offers early years practitioners games and activities that help children to acquire new words, to use them in appropriate contexts and to relish their sounds and visual appeal.Access to a wide, varied and rich vocabulary enables children to communicate ideas, to express feelings and needs, and to make meaningful connections with adults and peers. By exploring and acquiring new vocabulary children learn that words not only have a function but that are also fun.

The activities and suggestions in The Little Book of Sequencing Skills will help you and the children in your care to explore a range of creative ways to develop sequencing skills. The ability to sequence events and objects is essential for young children''s learning and the ability to put thoughts and actions into sequence is important for the development many competencies. Sequencing skills are often associated with communication and literacy but the ability to predict ''what will come next,'' whether it be in a mathematical pattern, following instructions, understanding patterns of letters and sounds, or understanding the consequences of actions is imperative across all areas of learning. There are many ways of developing sequencing skills. This book hopes to offer the early years practitioner a variety of practical, creative ways to help with the understanding, recognition and manipulation of sequences and to do so within the context of a variety of areas of learning.

Drawing from, and reflecting on, the experience of teenage years stilled by illness and pain, for this, her second collection, Keri Finlayson has made poems concerned with the complementarity and tension of movement and stasis.Many of the poems explore the meanings of textile as a weight and as a constant, as covering and as clothing. Some take comfort in the reassuring permanence of trees. Others, by contrast, represent fluidity: the flow of gossip, bird song, nursery rhymes, smoke, speech and scent; things that might move around the still island of the body or the bed. Here poetry is shown to be an attempt to make objects out of all that movement, and all that stillness.