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 an additional langauge.
Family Involvement
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We share the keywords for your child through the newsletter so that you can use them at home.
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Our family book shed provides reading materials for the whole family to borrow.
Understanding
We place a strong emphasis on developing children's language and communication skills. Through careful planning, children are introduced to key vocabulary before stories, activities and new learning experiences. Our tiered approach to vocabulary development ensures children first learn the words needed to understand instructions, routines and social interactions before building towards a richer vocabulary and more complex conversations. This helps children become confident communicators and supports their understanding across all areas of learning.
Supportive Environment
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New vocabulary is carefully planned and introduced throughout the curriculum to support language development.
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Learning spaces are designed to encourage conversation, interaction and communication.
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Daily routines provide regular opportunities for children to talk, listen and share ideas with adults and their peers.
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Staff use a range of strategies, including gesture and visual cues, to support children's understanding and participation.
Our Curriculum
Communication and Language is fundamental to children's learning, relationships, and overall development. Strong communication skills help children to express their needs, share their ideas, understand others, build relationships, and access all areas of learning as they grow.
These documents have been created to help parents understand how communication and language skills develop over time and how these skills are nurtured throughout children's early years. Every child develops at their own pace, but all children benefit from meaningful interactions, rich conversations, stories, songs, and opportunities to listen, understand, and communicate with others.
The progress visuals outline the progression of learning across four key areas: Interactions, Exploring Language, Listening and Understanding, and Phonics. It shows how children move from early attention and response, vocal play and first words, to increasingly confident conversations, complex language, critical listening, and early phonological awareness. They illustrate how children's communication skills develop from early social responsiveness and sound awareness to sustained conversations, thoughtful listening, rich vocabulary, and collaborative dialogue. The visual progression highlights how children learn to communicate clearly, explain their ideas, follow instructions, answer questions, develop an understanding of sounds in words, and become effective communicators.
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