Parent Meeting

Forty Hill CE Primary SchoolJanuary 21st 2015

The Language Pyramid

How do we communicate?

message spoken by another person

individual talks

What you can do at home

•Anything can be used for boosting language! And anywhere – in the car, at the park!•Look at books together (without worrying too much about your child’s reading skills) – talk about the pictures, talk about the characters, guess what happens next, what might the character say etc. Act the story out!•I can see/I am thinking of something games: I am thinking of something that is made of metal, that we use at mealtimes, that is sharp and is used for cutting.•Sentence games – take it in turns to add a word to make up a sentence.•Story games – take it in turns to say a sentence to make up a story.•Story cubes

• Vocabulary games – think of a category, e.g. animals, food, furniture, clothes, and take it in turns to name items from the category.

• Any game is good for attention and listening.• Playing games (board games, toys) and commenting on what

you are doing.• Cooking activities (weights/measures/numbers/concepts,

sequencing, instructions, vocabulary)• Talk about your day (good language model) before you ask

about his/her day.• Take photos and keep tickets from events/trips. Use these to

talk about things you have done.• Feely bag games – put some household objects in a bag or

pillowcase. Take turns to put your hand in the bag and describe what you are feeling (is it soft/hard/smooth/rough/ what is it made of/shape etc.). Can you guess what it is?

• Practise social situations, e.g. paying in shops, meeting new people, buying a train ticket etc. Think about the questions you might need to ask and the usual things you need to say. You can do this with puppets to make it more fun.

• Games like ‘Guess Who’ and Twenty Questions are good for developing questions.

• I spy games

This is not an exhaustive list and you may well be doing lots of these things already. Keep it up!

If you need more specific ideas or strategies, please do contact me via the school.

Pippa Chapman, Speech and Language Therapist