Bee Lingual

Carrie has over 30 years’ experience in education - now Director of Curriculum for the Brooke Weston Trust and a visiting fellow for Ambition Institute delivering NPQ training, Carrie was at that time the Principal of Peckover Primary School in Wisbech; a school with 54% of pupils, originating from many parts of Europe, having English as an additional language. This was a challenge that she tackled with great enthusiasm and creativity! ​ Our first step was to re-write the curriculum completely, ensuring children were exposed to high quality texts and a wide range of vocabulary. Our classroom environments immersed children in their learning and our mantra was ‘talk, talk and more talk’. We planned structured oral opportunities into all our lessons, using the excellent ‘Tower Hamlets, ‘progression in Language structures; we had continuous provision from Nursery through to year 2 centred on language rich environments and opportunities. However, we discovered that once our pupils had acquired enough English to let them read, write and converse fluently, the progress of some began to plateau. These could be pupils who weren’t speaking their first language much at home, or reading books in it. In some cases, pupils were starting to lose their first language altogether, making it harder to build and develop their English. We sent a set of BeeLingual UK dual-language books home with every EAL child, so they could read stories in their first language and in English with their parents We used our bilingual Teaching Assistants to lead daily first language discussion groups to develop a rich and challenging vocabulary We used colourful discussion mats to pre-teach pupils in first language and English, deploying them alongside stems based on Progression in Language Structures Our pastoral team used first language emotion cards to help pupils describe and explain their feelings We introduced a ‘no hands up’ policy to promote lively class discussion We taught the whole schools songs in first languages and English Using the resources we were developing at BeeLingual UK, we introduced a whole raft of strategies to cultivate a rich vocabulary in first language and subsequently in English.