Communication and Language

The ability to communicate is a fundamental part of a child's development and forms the basis of all learning in your child's first year at school. We focus on developing, supporting and extending children’s learning and competence in communicating, speaking and listening. This involves giving children opportunities to experience a rich language environment. This, in turn, helps them to develop their oracy skills so that they are able to express themselves and both speak and listen clearly and confidently in a range of situations. The use of our engaging small world and role play areas encourage children to develop their communication skills and learn a vast range of vocabulary that is linked to our half termly topics. It is here, where they develop those important conversational skills as well as the ability to become imaginative and creative during their play. 

All children are encouraged to participate as speakers and listeners in a variety of situations and for a range of purposes and audiences, using and extending language in an imaginative way.  In particular, during our daily story time and literacy sessions, the children are taught to use talk to clarify thinking, ideas, feelings and events, as well as learning to sustain attentive listening in different contexts.

Each of our curriculum planners contain all the vocabulary that we explicitly teach to the children, enabling them to expand their language and helping to foster confident speaking individuals.