"If we teach students the words, we give them the world" - Stahl and Kapinus.

At Mayflower, we want to teach the pupils to communicate effectively. To do this, we have provided every child with the tools to be able to take on a variety of roles within speech. Pupils are taught to initiate, build on and summarise conversations independently and within groups. We recognise that effective communication is an essential life skill for our pupils and one which takes practise. We provide every child with a 'Functional Language' booklet which is full of sentence stems for a variety of talk opportunities, such as agreeing and disagreeing. Pupils learn how to talk respectfully and the reasons why this is important. In addition to this, we also recognise that subjects also require specific vocabulary within discussions or writing. We have also created a 'Functional Language' booklet for cross curricular subjects and the sentence stems which would support this. We have called this 'Talking like a...' for each subject.  

Alongside these booklets, we also use our Tiered vocabulary to develop our knowledge and understanding of words and how to use them in specific contexts. Our functional language and our tiered vocabulary ensures that we are striving to broaden the effective communication of our pupils.

Talking Like a...