Language-Rich Environments

Language-Rich Environments

 At Blossom years we strive to enhance a child’s language. Communication and language are a big part of a child’s day to day within the nursery setting. Language helps develop a child’s social skills and build relationships with others. It helps them to express themselves, giving them their own voice which makes them unique and able to impart their knowledge to others. We do this by promoting language-rich environments.

A language-rich environment enhances children’s communication and language skills through interactions and being exposed to different forms of language and a variety of other things.

Developing these areas and ensuring that they are a part of our setting is important for a child’s overall development. These skills that are learnt will help them with their future development and will begin to build a foundation to develop in other areas of learning.

A few things we consider when creating these places are.

Language:

Making sure our environment is filled with different sorts of language, including stories, songs and everyday conversations.

Interactions:

Making sure we as practitioners are engaging with children, giving them the opportunity to take part in conversation and understanding how to enhance each child’s communication skills. This will only happen if a child feels confident, so we focus on building bonds with the children to build their confidence. This confidence building starts with our settling in process, which involves collecting information from parents about their child, inviting parent and child into setting for periods of time, short settling sessions and most importantly the keyperson approach.

Opportunities for Play:

Children learn through play, it is their natural way to learn. Our environment offers different opportunities to play in various ways. E.g. role play, construction, malleable, creative arts

Quiet Spaces:

We provide quiet spaces for children, these are important, it gives them the opportunity to think about what they would like to do or say. It also gives them an opportunity to relax and listen.

You can also create these places at home with your children, so in each of their familiar environments they will also have these opportunities.

Encouraging a rich vocabulary:

We look at books and read daily, reading to children and narrating what they are doing even if they cannot talk back to you. By doing these things for children, they can listen to the words and vocabulary and absorb this.

We use open ended questions as they are a strong way to get children thinking about what they have to say. It gives them the opportunity to stop and think.

Here are some examples of open-ended questions:

“What do you think would happen if”?

“How do you feel when”?

 “Can you tell me more about”?

We use lots of repetition when speaking to children, this builds up a sense of familiarity around words which helps children develop confidence when learning new words.

We also ensure that children have enough time to think about their response and process what has been said to them…… did you know you a child can take at least 10 seconds to respond to you ?? It’s a long time if you stop and count to 10 for a response! However, we are mindful that children do need this time, so staff give time for each child to respond.

Enhancing language using external agencies…

To make sure we are doing our very best to promote language we have outside agencies come into the setting to engage the children in a variety of different activities. We have a music sessions once a week where our music teacher will engage the children in song, dance, puppets and games.

We have also have a qualified speech therapist come into the nursery once a month who has been running sessions with staff supporting them to grow their current skills on how to enhance language to a very high standard.