Language Bites, for verbal reasoning

This pack is based on an original resource devised by Elizabeth Love and Sue Reilly, Australian Speech and Language Pathologists who also have additional qualifications in education. From their knowledge and expertise working in clinical and educational settings, they have produced resources for language and literacy development, with a particular focus on oral language and verbal reasoning.

The eighty ‘cards’ in the pack give teachers and speech therapists/pathologists suggestions for varied and entertaining activities to promote speaking and listening in four key areas of oral language; asking questions, active listening, building vocabulary and using language for thinking. These can be used as whole-class activities to meet curriculum targets or to address individual therapy targets. Ideal for use with vocabulary groups.

The pack is split into four sections:

• Active listening: the twenty activities in the Active Listening section will assist the development of critical listening skills necessary for listening to and understanding teacher instructions and for participation in class discussion.
• Quality questions and answers:the activities in this section focus on a fundamental aspect of classroom success and learning – questioning and answering
• Word wonder: The twenty activities in this section facilitate an understanding of and flexibility with word meanings. The activities encourage a focus beyond just nouns and adjectives to include awareness of ‘thinking’ verbs and non-literal word meanings.
• Powerful thinking:The twenty activities for Powerful Thinking provide opportunities to develop an understanding of the relationships between ideas, as well as skills in inference and visualisation. The open-ended nature of many of the tasks encourages the development of confidence in communication as well as imagination and creativity.

Aims:

• vocabulary development
• word finding skills
• attention and listening
• question formation
• verbal reasoning

Age range: KS1-KS3 (6 years +)

Contents: Five pages of background and instructions, 80 ‘cards’ 2 per page, no illustrations.

Format: PDF file, 80 pages. Available by download.