Oracy

At Allfarthing, we believe spoken language to be essential in the development and achievement of all of our children. Oracy is embedded in the whole ethos of our school and we strive to develop spoken language skills through all areas of the curriculum, assemblies and break times. The children have been active in building what we think great oracy is and we have used this as the basis for our weekly school oracy targets. We believe that every child should leave Allfarthing with a voice, rich vocabulary and increased confidence in how they interact with people in a wide range of situations.

To achieve this vision, we teach oracy using a variety of different methods, which include:

Sentence stems

Statement discussions with hand signals

Speaking in full sentences

Thinking time

Think Pair Share

Vocabulary bullseye

Big Boss/Talk detectives

Rally coaching

Achieving whole school weekly targets using our oracy bricks

Oracy based assemblies

Changing our weekly talk partner

Talking homework

Here are a few ideas of ways you could support your children at home with oracy:

Discuss a news article – read a newspaper article together or watch Newsround and ask questions about this. For example, what did you learn from reading that article? How did the people feel?

Come up with a word of the day – encourage new vocabulary learnt to be used in your child’s writing or in a conversation they have that day.

Interview someone – encourage your child to interview a neighbour, a family member or a family friend. Come up with the questions together and identify what they might learn from this experience.

Create a talk box – this is an exciting way to ensure conversations take place in your house. This could be an item that can be collected by you or your child. It can be as simple as a leaf, with the idea that you or your child talk in detail about how you came to have the leaf in your talk box.

Ask questions to develop answers – ‘why’ is such a powerful word to use with your child, it develops their sentences and thought process as they have to explain further.

Play a game and discuss the rules – this can be as simple as playing different board games and getting your child to explain the rules