Talking Tuesdays

From our Talking Tables training we have introduced Talking Tuesdays to St Marys @ The Park. Each week (Tuesday) Key Workers will focus on speech and language as part of their group time sessions. Key Workers will show children a picture card and encourage them to lead discussions about it. This acivity will promote children's language development at all levels from gestures and pointing to single words, building up to more complex sentences and asking questions. Practitioners will ensure all children have an opportunity to develop their speech and language through these wekly activities along with numerous others we do at nursery. To launch our Talking Tuesdays we also sent home a picture card acivity for children to have the opportunity to share their activities with their families. If you have not yet carried out the activity and returned your sheet to nursery then please do so. The activity can be carried out in the child's home language if they are more confident in that language.
In addition to this we will have our Talking Table out during the session. This week Amanda carried out the activity using a padlock and keys as a focus point to start the conversation. The idea is then to follow the child's lead talking about whatever they are happy to talk about, offering writing resources for them to doodle as they talk. I will post further updates on the blog as Talking Tuesdays and Talking Tables become embedded in our practise.
We are working towards children being confident to say, understand and use 5000 words for when they start school.