Good Communicators

Early Language Development

We use speech and language screening and intervention programmes to support our younger children with their spoken language development. The Nuffield Early Language Intervention (NELI) is a 20-week programme proven to help young children overcome language difficulties. It is designed for children aged 4-5 years and combines small group work with one-to-one sessions delivered by trained teaching assistants, targeting vocabulary, narrative skills, active listening and phonological awareness. 

Speech Link is used to identify and support children with developmental speech sound difficulties. Screening assessments help us to decide who needs to be seen by a Speech and Language Therapist and those at risk of literacy difficulties. We can then bespoke interventions on a 1:1 basis for children. 

Opportunities to talk

As a Federation, we teach children to read and write using a scheme called Read Write Inc. Part of this programme encourages teamwork and partnerships, which are fundamental for good communication. 

Teamwork 

We want children to be motivated to work together, teach each other, practise together, talk together and give feedback to each other.  Teamwork is key.

Partnerships

Articulating a thought forces children to engage.  It makes children organise what they know and what they don’t.  We want all children to practise what they have been taught with a partner regularly in lessons. In all Read Write Inc. lessons they should practise every activity and answer every question together. 

Full participation and engagement

We don't use hands up, thumbs up or lolly sticks in our federation. In classrooms where these strategies are used, only a few children ever respond to questions.  Those who don’t respond to questions are unlikely to be paying attention.  We gain and keep children’s attention throughout lessons by using the following three techniques:

Choral work: My Turn Your Turn (MTYT)

We use choral work when we want children to copy what we’ve just said.

Partner Practice

Children are asked to recall what we have just taught them by teaching their partners: teachers are then able to check if their teaching has been successful or not.

Partner Talk

Children pay attention because they know they will be expected to answer every question with their partner and could be called upon to share their response with the rest of the group.

Knowledge Organisers, Knowledge Notes and Vocabulary Development

A knowledge organiser is a document, usually one A4 page, that contains the core knowledge pupils will need for a new unit being taught. Knowledge Organisers:

-Convey the essential knowledge in one place

-Highlights key vocabulary

-Provide a reference point for pupils and teachers

-Are used to support questioning, retrieval and participation

-Reduces split attention effect by using images to convey content

-Addresses misconceptions

A Knowledge Note sits along the margin of a pupil's exercise book to support their learning in a single lesson. It elaborates on the information shared in the Knowledge Organiser offering pupils:

-A key question to think about and answer in the lesson

-A guide for the taught content in that lesson

-The core knowledge and key vocabulary needed in the lesson

The Leitner System

In order to help children to remember the information presented in the Knowledge Organisers, we teach them to create flashcards containing the information and then to use the Leitner System to recall it. 

The Leitner system is a well-known and very effective method of using flashcards. It's a form of spaced repetition that help you study the cards you don't know more often than the cards you already know well.

Watch the video below to find out how it works.