Word of the Week!

At St Clement Danes we have launched an exciting project to help expand and enrich our children's vocabulary: WORD OF THE WEEK!

 

Why does language development matter?

What is the 'word gap'?

 

What can we do to close the 'word gap' and expand children's vocabulary?

How do children learn new vocabulary?

Research by the Oxford University Press (2018) showed that:

 

How can we help expand children's vocabulary?

To hear about some of the ways that school staff are working to help expand children's vocabulary, click here.

At St Clement Danes this year, we have also launched Vocabulary Ninja's WORD OF THE WEEK. Every child in the school is taking part in this exciting challenge. The aim is to enable all our children to use a rich repertoire of words!

The weekly words are Tier 1 or Tier 2 words:

The new Words of the Week are announced in Golden Assembly each week. They are displayed on the noticeboard in the school entrance, in classrooms and published at the start of each week in the School Newsletter.

We expect Early Years and KS1 to understand and use the 'Grasshopper words' (Tier 1) but they can also challenge themselves to learn the 'Shinobi words' (Tier 2).

Children in KS2 are expected to understand and use both the Grasshopper and Shinobi words.

The whole school is buzzing with words!

At the start of each week, children are explicitly taught these words and teachers promote the words with fun activities. Children will be rewarded with 'Word Warrior' tickets when they're caught using the words correctly in different contexts during the day! In Golden Assembly each Friday, a 'Word Warrior of the Week' is picked randomly from the bag and that child then gets to have the special Vocabulary Ninja toy attached to their chair for the whole week ahead!

 

What can you do at home?

Below are some examples of the weekly posters. Look out for the new posters in the School Newsletter at the start of each week and displayed around school!

 

Click the link below to hear a story all about words - 'The Word Collector'!