At St Mary’s Spoken Language is an integrated part of our behaviour for learning and as a tool for communication.  We use the National Curriculum Statutory requirements to plan from and as a school we have identified the following strands as focus areas;

Listening

• St Mary’s children are encouraged to be active listeners and speakers and use their words to communicate their feelings, knowledge and areas of learning which they have not understood.  
• We teach children what good listening involves, and good listening prompts are displayed in every classroom.  
• Cards developed in conjunction with the C and I team are used to support children with C and I needs who have not understood an aspect of learning/ instruction.

Asking questions

• We model the use of recall questions and use open ended questions (especially using a think aloud strategy in Guided Reading) to support children in the asking of their own questions to deepen their understanding and knowledge across the curriculum.

Vocabulary

• We actively teach tier 2 vocabulary and do not assume that children are familiar with what is being discussed.  
• Project vocabulary is part of the spelling provision across Key Stage 1 and 2
• TAs use vocabulary flashcards to support our ambition of ‘sticky’ knowledge

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Give well-structured descriptions, explanations and narratives for different purposes

• The children use colourful semantics to structure their sentences, story maps and text skeletons to organise their ideas for oral presentations.