Developing B.S.L Skills

The photos below show the range of activities that deaf children take part in through their time at James Wolfe. It also highlights the importance of an individualised approach to planning and delivery to ensure that every child’s need is met. Interventions are well planned and resourced. Children are integrated as much as possible into mainstream. The centre provides a specialised curriculum with a nurturing atmosphere to allow children with language delay to make accelerated progress.

Sounds in Vocabulary with Reception

Reception children are in the sound treated room for a quick intervention to ensure that they know the new sounds being used. One child is using cued articulation to support her saying of the sounds. The ther child is unaided and is therefore not learning phonics but the fingerspelling of each letter. Alongside the letters they also learn new vocabulary linked to that letter to support their language development.

Using Stories to Broaden Vocabularies in Year 1

Y1 children are achieving at age expected across the entire curriculum. Therefore, they are staying in their mainstream class all day with BSL support. They enjoy taking part in the Year 1 curriculum and are currently learning new vocabulary linked to traditional tales like the Gingerbread Man. Year 1 use the same strategies as their hearing peers to decode words, with the additional support of cued articulation for a visual reference to the sound.

Developing Tenses with Centre 1

In Centre 1 the children have been enjoying exploring different sentence structures with a focus on the past tense. Some children were able to challenge themselves and started using ‘because’ as a conjunction to extend their sentences in the past tense. They then used their understanding of different sentence structures to write their own creative sentences about the core text The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. They were able to do this independently without using any resources such as iPads or shape coding cards.

Creating BSL Poetry with Centre 3

In Centre 3 children enjoyed expressing themselves in BSL grammar order to write a poem about themselves. They had a strong focus on adjectives and understanding the different functions such as describing how someone looks, what someone is like or how someone is feeling. After watching some BSL poem performances by famous deaf poets, they were able to create their own videos, performing their own poems using movement, facial expressions and body language to convey meaning.