Developing my Oral Language Programme Across the Curriculum

 This week I have been trying to access my students prior knowledge by remembering to include reading, talking and writing to help my students to make connections, and to make my sessions full of rich oral language.

Our poem of the week was Autumn Leaves. Before introducing the poem I asked my students if they could tell me anything about seasons. One student asked if summer was a season, I replied with yes summer is a season, we have four seasons. Can anyone think of another season which in turn led to us writing down the four seasons; Spring, summer, Autumn and Winter.

I followed this up by asking my students what season they thought it was now and provided the options of where to move to in the classroom if they believed the season to be Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. All seasons were covered by this activity. I then proceeded to ask each group why they thought it was their chosen season.

Spring: I know we have had summer, so I think it is Spring.

Summer: The sun is shinning and it is hot. (These students were sat next to the window and the sun was flowing through the windows).

Autumn: I have been seeing the leaves and they are orange and brown.

Winter: In the morning it was very cold and the grass is cold and wet when I walked across it.

I continued to explain how they all had very good reasons for choosing the season they had. I then asked do you know what colour the leaves on the trees would be for the different seasons. One student then went to gather some leaves that were on the ground for us to look at. After further discussion we agreed with Autumn being the correct season.

Our poem was then introduced and we talked about how we could describe the action of the leaves as they fall from the trees. The students came up with words like drop, fall, fly, blow all of these were provided in sentences. I then agreed that they had good sentences and provided another word, flutter with the sentence: The leaves flutter like a butterfly down to the ground. The student then added to my sentence words like, slowly fluttered, softly fluttered.

After going over our poem my students then glue this into their books and draw a background that suits the poem. Here are two examples:

After our poem we moved onto maths. we have been looking at making groups to  five using simple addition and subtraction. I decided that we would make a display of these facts using the autumn leaves. Here are a few examples of our autumn facts to five.