Adult Interactions

At Carlton Junior and Infants School we know that interactions with your children are so important. We ensure that in during the school day we hold back and forth interactions to form foundations for language and mental development, we ensure we have the time to hold a number of quality conversations in our language- rich environment and we comment on what the children are doing or interested in and echo back what they say with new vocabulary.

The adults in Foundation Stage use many different ways of interacting to support your children; words, body language, facial expressions, actions, songs. We support all children including those with little speech or non- verbal children, using objects, pictures or visual cues. When speaking to your children we make sure we take turns and wait for them to respond, building the confidence and independence. Our adults maintain conversations by being warm and attentive and adapt language to meet the needs of individual children.

We know that young children need time to decide what to say and plan an answer, if the question is challenging they need time to think and to find the right words with which to answer. At Carlton we use a ten second rule when asking children questions, our children are now much more confident to want to freely share and offer information and engage in conversations about their learning with adults.