Spoken Language at Cumberland

Practising Goldilocks and the Three Bears…..

Spoken language forms the foundation for all learning in English. We aim for our children at Cumberland to ‘learn to talk and learn through talk’. High quality and varied spoken language underpins our curriculum and our children should develop a positive attitude of themselves as communicators. We want to enable our children to be confident and inquisitive learners who are able to express and share ideas and emotions, problem solve, reason and discuss a range of subjects in a variety of contexts.

Reception Children Retelling 'Supertato!'

Aims
* Enable children to become increasingly fluent and accurate in confidently expressing thoughts, emotions,
imagination, opinions and creativity, taking into account different audiences and a wide range of contexts.
* Broaden children’s vocabulary, grammar knowledge and their enjoyment of language to enrich their learning
and their understanding of reading and writing.
* Encourage children to be inquisitive learners who are attentive listeners and ask relevant questions.
* Teach children to work collaboratively in small groups or pairs, showing that they are able to take turns to
listen, respect opinions, respond appropriately to the ideas of others and develop ideas through shared
discussion.
* Empower children to develop their confidence and imagination, enabling them to explore role-play and
characterisation.
* Teach children to reason and problem solve across a variety of contexts.

Teaching and Learning approaches
 

•  Listening to and participating in a wide range of stories, poems, rhymes and songs.
• Language rich learning environments including role play areas and displays to support and stimulate spoken language.
• Talk for Writing strategies (Pie Corbett) to support oral language, build vocabulary and language structures and embed knowledge of texts.
• Reading aloud or performing to larger audiences either in class/assemblies or in year group productions.
• Drama activities such as performing, hot seating, conscious alley, or use of puppets to enrich their language and stimulate their imagination.
• Effective use of open questioning across the curriculum to inspire deeper thinking and stimulate discussion.
•  Adult and child interactions deliberately connect events, ideas and actions.
• Collaborative paired, group and whole class discussion where children are encouraged to share experiences, opinions and ideas.
•  Opportunities in class for children to talk about and discuss their learning across the curriculum.
• Use of sentence-stems to scaffold oral responses in class.