Our Centre classes are leading the way

This term children enjoyed taking part in their mainstream classroom topics. Children who attend the centre for English and maths also enjoyed having a shared topic amongst them, with an underlying focus on deaf education, identity and developing speech and language skills.

Relationships with texts

The children have been enjoying a book about a deaf mermaid who lost her ‘cockle implant’. The author being a 9 year-old, deaf girl has been inspirational and encouraged more independent writing. As they became familiar with the text, the children started making their own predictions about what will happen in the story. They will now be creating their own stories where they lose their listening devices.

Expressing ourselves

Self expression and language development is one of the key focal skills in the Centre. In Year 3 it is important for children to start becoming more independent with their language, using different tools at their disposal to communicate. Through deaf awareness sessions and having strong, deaf role models children have shown resilience and adaptability. One of the tools (pictured) is using story maps to be able to re-tell what they want using clear structure.

Story writing

This term we have loved learning about rainforests. Using the text ‘Lost in the Jungle’ we have developed our summarising skills and retold the story in our best BSL. We then created story maps of the events. We have written our own versions of this story using all the literary devices we have learnt about this year. These include past tense, pronouns, expanded noun phrases with powerful adjectives and dialogue. We are currently editing these pieces of work, using Shape Coding to support ourselves. We are also enjoying the Year 5 text ‘The Explorer’, we are developing our prediction and inference skills in our daily reading sessions, using both spoken English and BSL to access the text.