bee lingual
London
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.
