Language development is at the heart of everything we do at Chatham Nursery School. It is recognised that speech, language and communication difficulties can affect lots of different areas of a person’s life. Early identification and intervention is key in reducing the impact.
In Liverpool, WellComm, which is a language screening and intervention toolkit, has been adopted to be used in Early Years and school settings to screen children and identify areas of strength and need. Appropriate intervention can then be delivered within the child’s setting to support their progress.
To begin with the practitioner completes a profile of the child’s needs and strengths. This helps to identify children who need targeted support and close monitoring and also any child that may need a referral to a specialist service e.g SALT, community paediatrician. Given the waiting times for speech and language therapists, WellComm provides nurseries and schools with an immediate SLCN profile and ready-made interventions that can be used straight away. WellComm reports can be included in a referral.
Phonics
Phonics is a method of teaching children to read by correlating sounds with individual letters or groups of letters.
Phase 1 phonics typically focuses on developing children’s listening skills and their awareness of sounds in their environment. It is often introduced in Nursery and is not about learning specific letter-sound correspondences for reading and spelling, as in later phases. Instead, Phase 1 is more about laying the foundation for phonological awareness.
We have made a video to help explain this a little more clearly:
Ideas for home learning:
There are many ways that you can support your child to tune into sounds, and help focus their listening and attention skills.
Please have a look through this booklet for ideas: Phase 1 phonics activities for home