I completed the Blast training today. So, I am now equipped to blast off, er I mean boldly go forth and run Blast sessions in nurseries and schools. At this stage in the proceedings, you may well be wondering what on earth Blast is and whether you care. Well, the short answer is that Blast is a language boosting programme, devised by a speech and language therapist and designed to be used with young children. Blast 1 is predominantly aimed at nursery children, aged 3 to 4 years old, whilst Blast 2 is targeted at reception class children, aged 4 to 5.
Having scoured the internet for research on the effectiveness of the Blast programme, I have so far drawn a bit of a blank. Of course, this doesn’t mean that Blast doesn’t work. Research evidence often lags behind practice, rather than driving it. As an off-piste example of this, consider the decades of research and pots of money that went by the wayside before it was finally accepted as fact that smoking is bad for your health. Proving things scientifically and definitively, it seems, takes time. So, at the moment, there may be a lack of hard, research evidence to support that Blast works. Positively though, there seems to instead be lots of feedback from parents and teachers to suggest that the programme is having a beneficial effect on children.
Looking at the programme in detail, I can see that it’s a very structured way of delivering activities to benefit child language development. The approach echoes the sort of stuff that speech and language therapists usually do, but in an intensive, high volume way. As the Blast programme is well designed, intensive and exposes children to up to 15 hours of language stimulation in just a few weeks, perhaps it’s just common sense that the children who take part will or should reap benefits. Positive effects have been reported in terms of children both understanding language better and showing improved behaviour too.
So how does Blast actually work? Well, for a start, it runs across 30 consecutive sessions. A trained Blastee, like myself, will lead each session and there’ll be 4 to 8 children per group. The first session takes 25 to 30 minutes, whilst subsequent ones are shorter, at 15 to 20 minutes apiece. There’s a mix of activities in each session. These include the ‘Hello song’, listening to environmental sounds (like aeroplanes and motorbikes), listening to speech sounds and distinguishing between them, interactive storytelling, a language boosting activity and the ‘goodbye song’.
One thing I really like about the programme is the emphasis on every child succeeding, all the time. With mixed ability groups, this is achieved by giving children as many clues as they need to get the right answer or solution: the adult guides them to the point where they have practically given the children the right answer, but they still get to experience success from being the ones to come up with it in the end.
Interested to find out more about the Blast programme for nursery and reception children? Please see the Blast Training Programme website.
Kirsty Henderson 12th August 2014
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