How We Teach Communication and Language

Communication and language plays a crucial role in a child's overall development. A child’s ability to communicate effectively impacts on all areas of the curriculum and is an essential life skill. Our ambitious curriculum and expert practitioners ensure every child leaves our school communicating with greater confidence.

Listening and Attention:

We encourage children to listen actively during activities, stories, and conversations by ensuring that all sessions are interactive and interesting!

Staff are expert storytellers, who deliver rich story sessions that encourage active engagement. Throughout the session they provide opportunities for children to follow instructions and respond to questions.

Signing:

We teach a core set of signs to all children to ensure that children who are preverbal, hearing impaired/deaf and those at the early stages of English language acquisition can communicate with adults and their peers. The embedded use of signing at the school ensures that children and adults are regularly connecting and communicating.

Speaking

We provide a communication rich environment where spaces and activities are specifically designed to promote conversations. We encourage children to express themselves using signs, words, gestures, and eventually sentences. We fully encourage children to develop their expertise in their home language as this will support the development of a second language.

Family Involvement

We share the keywords for your child for the book of the week on our newsletter so that you can use them at home.
Our family book shed provides reading materials for the whole family to borrow.

Understanding

We ensure that children develop their understanding of language by promoting vocabulary development. Through careful planning all children are introduced to keywords prior to listening to stories. We take a ‘Practice makes Permanent’ approach to the vocabulary children are exposed to and staff identify the key vocabulary needed for children to understand instructions, requests and social pleasantries before moving on to understand more complex language and rich conversation .

Supportive Environment:

The introduction of new vocabulary is carefully planned to ensure that children are exposed to a range of new words.
Areas of the environment are designed to promote communication – such as snack areas and cosy corners.
The rhythm of the day is designed to allow time for children to communicate with adults and peers.
All staff use gesture and facial expressions to aid children's understanding.