Intent | Our curriculum recognises the importance of spoken language in pupil’s learning right across the curriculum. We ensure pupils have every opportunity to acquire and use a wide vocabulary, and the skills to communicate their thinking and understanding to a range of audiences. |
Implementation
| Our lessons are structured to ensure speaking and listening is at the heart of learning. Pupils frequently communicate their ideas, views and opinions in paired, group and class discussions. Children are taught what it means to be a good listener and develop their understanding of how to listen respectfully and politely to others. Carefully planned for subject specific vocabulary is taught through our topics and pupils take part in debates and presentations to hone their communication skills. Children are encouraged to develop their responses through careful questioning from the teachers and children are taught to follow on from each others’ ideas. Children develop their questioning across the curriculum, for example understanding how to ask varied scientific questions showing curiosity using a range of vocabulary. |
Through our curriculum (in line with the National Curriculum) our pupils are taught to:
Spoken Language Across the Curriculum
Helicopter Stories
In our EYFS, our children are introduced to 'helicopter stories' to develop their story telling and knowledge of story language. The children decide on their story as a group and it is scribed by their teacher and the children are then encouraged to see themselves as authors and then perform their stories to others. This is then built on throughout our daily story times in KS1, where we learn stories with actions and then perform them.
Drama
Across the school, we use a range of drama activities to support the children's learning, for example hot seating, role play and conscience alley. We use these activities to allow the children to get in role and develop their understanding of a range of characters and stories.
Presenting
As a part of our TASC approach, all children are encouraged to find solutions to problems across the curriculum. They then present these solutions to the rest of the class and make choices about how to support their presentation e.g. with leaflets or PowerPoints. Also our children are encouraged to present their home learning to the class. We also encourage children to present their writing to the class and expect other children evaluate the effectiveness of their presentation.
Vocabulary
Our vocabulary is carefully planned across the curriculum to support a careful progression, for more information about key vocabulary taught in each year group please visit the individual subject pages. We also have discussion prompts in each classroom to encourage high quality discussion in each curriculum area.
Debating club
Pupils within Year 5 and 6 have the opportunity to attend debating club, where they discuss current issues.