Early Development Groups at The Sarah Duffen Centre

The charity's Early Development Groups (for pre-school children aged 18 months to 4 years) work with parents to help their children develop their language, cognitive and social skills.

About the Early Development Groups

The Early Development Groups :

• provide individual advice and recommend structured activities to promote development, with a particular focus on speech, language, communication, literacy, numeracy, cognitive development, social skills and behaviour.
• offer group activities relevant for each child's age and stage of development
• encourage parents to continue activities with their children at home and to help evaluate the effectiveness of the services.

Speech and language skills

The speech and language activities are designed to teach spoken language, using signing as a bridge to talking. Activities cover:

• speech-sound work to develop clear speech – listening to and copying sounds, then words and sentences
• vocabulary learning – understanding and signing then saying first words
• sentence learning – practising two and three key words together, then sentences

Reading skills

Reading activities are introduced at the two-word stage as research indicates that children with Down syndrome are visual learners and can benefit greatly from reading.

Research conducted by the charity over many years indicates that reading develops the children's spoken language and verbal memory skills.

Cognitive skills

Cognitive activities are designed to build children's knowledge ready for school and include games to develop memory skills and to teach concepts including number, size and colour.

Social and behavioural skills

Social skills and appropriate behaviour are encouraged through the group nature of the activities which encourage listening, attention, turn-taking, learning from other children and following instructions.

These are all behaviours that are important for learning as well as for building motivation and self-confidence.

Getting ready for school

Advice about preparation for school, including learning self-help skills, self-occupation, and independence is also provided as the children near school age.

* Please note: ages are approximate and children's individual needs are met according to their stage of development as well as their chronological age.

Bookings

If you wish to find out more about our early intervention services or about booking your child onto an Early Development Group, visit the joining the groups page.

The Early Development Groups are supported by BBC Children in Need and HSBC Bank.