Oracy at Sir John Heron

Intent

Our goal at Sir John Heron Primary School is to support every child to become an independent speaker.  It is fundamental for all children to achieve their full potential by being able to communicate effectively with their teachers and peers.  Within our school, we believe that excellent communication skills are a vital part of life as this helps to develop the confidence of our children.  We encourage all groups of children to articulate themselves clearly at all times. 

Implementation

Oracy is taught as part of our curriculum because this allows all children to participate in a wide range of discussions.  The activities are pitched according to each year group.  Our teaching of Oracy focuses on four main strands which include: Physical, Linguistic, Cognitive and Social & Emotional.  

Within Physical, we teach our children to speak at a clear pace, use appropriate facial expressions and project their voices clearly.  The Linguistic strand focuses on developing the vocabulary of our children.  Within the Cognitive strand, our children learn to structure their ideas before presenting to a wider audience.  Finally, the Social and Emotional aspect focuses on teaching all of our children to take turns appropriately and listen actively to one another.

Impact

Our main outcome is that all children should become successful at discussing a variety of topics. In addition to this, we hope that all of our learners can embed Oracy within every aspect of the curriculum as speaking and listening are vital skills.  Our children will be able to take part in debates by arguing their point of view.  Furthermore, our learners will become successful young citizens. 

Every Oracy lesson follows the sequence below:

Warm up

The children will engage in a starter activity to spark their thinking e.g. odd one out.

Main part

A particular strand will be selected and that will become the focus e.g. Physical.  Within that strand the lesson will focus on voice projection.

Plenary

The children will reflect on their learning by discussing something new they have learnt.

Within our lessons, we provide talk prompts for all children to encourage them to use a range of sentence structures.  This enables them to develop their speaking along with their listening.