Word Aware is mostly a whole school approach, with small groups also held for children who need either pre-teaching of vocabulary, or who need to acquire word learning skills before they can benefit fully from the rest of the approach. The approach is about making words a priority and there are some lovely ideas throughout of how to do this in school without it taking loads of extra time and planning. Consultative support, including coaching and class demonstrations, can be arranged following your training to help you get off to a flying start!

Teaching vocabulary: Teaching topic related vocabulary using STAR approach. S- Select words from the curriculum Set one: Longer version for schools which are still open for selected children. These activities may also be adapted and sent home. Word group spinner– as demonstrated when the computer failed you don’t really need anything fancy, just something to point with or a pot to hold the cards. On one side have 4 letters and on the other 4 categories such as noun, verb, adjective, living thing, food etc. then choose one from both sides and see if you can find 5 words to fit the sound and category. Either do it together or turn it into fastest wins! Takes a highly practical, evidence-based and curriculum-focused approach to vocabulary learning that supports a broad range of learnersThis approach is full of practical and inspiring ideas that can be easily applied by busy classroom practitioners to develop both spoken and written vocabulary. Word Aware allows us, using a whole school approach, to teach all pupils how to understand the relationship between words, how to understand nuances in meaning, and how to develop their understanding of, and ability to use, figurative language. Pupils will be taught how to work out and clarify the meanings of unknown words and words with more than one meaning. Word aware is equally effective for specific classes and groups or individual learners. It builds on the knowledge of the components of a word.

Word Aware continues to have a supportive application in secondary schools as pupils begin to require an understanding of specialist and subject-specific vocabulary. Remember to try and use these new words in your conversations to embed them into your child’s vocabulary We can also train Teachers and Teaching Assistants in using Word Aware. The next training date is the 27th March 2018 at the RCSLT in London – follow this link to Eventbrite to book your placeSet two: shorter version for families who are home-schooling. Involve the whole family and play the ones you like. The teacher will select the appropriate words to teach using the Word Aware approach. These will be really useful words which are likely to be encountered again in spoken language or reading. The average adult will have a good level of knowledge of the word. Topic words will be taught where they are core to topic learning. A hands on practical day in how to carry out therapy with an adult Neuro and community client group

If you would like to arrange online training for your school or service go to commissioning training Vocabulary levels are strong predictors of later literacy skills. They predict not only how well children will develop reading comprehension, but also their phonological awareness and phonic knowledge. Vocabulary level at age five has been found to be the single best predictor of whether a child brought up in poverty will escape poverty in adult life. Without a good vocabulary, children struggle to understand what they are taught, to express how they feel, to manage social situations and resolve conflicts” – Jean Gross CBE in the Foreword to the Word Aware book.It is a known fact that children with good vocabulary go on to become good readers. Orally tested vocabulary at the end of first grade is a significant prediction of reading comprehension 10 years later (Cunningham and Stanovich,1997). However, children do not always come into schools with a basic vocabulary. Although vocabulary development is crucial for school success, it has not received the attention and interest that work on identifying printed words and spellings have received (Biemiller and Slonim, 2001). The evidence is clear – we can make a difference by providing consistent attention to vocabulary growth, which in turn would improve literacy growth. It is based on a system called STAR (Blachowicz and Fisher, 2010) and I think this process is a really helpful way to think of vocabulary teaching. You can’t teach a word one day and then forget about it – it needs to be a much more systematic approach. STAR stands for Select Teach Activate Review. It obviously isn’t realistic to sum up the whole of the approach in one blog post, but I thought I would talk today about each of these 4 aspects a little bit. In the book, Stephen and Anna apply this to topics, literacy, concepts and emotions, but the principles are the same and I’ll talk about topic vocabulary here. We have worked with the amazing people at Lift Lessons and they have developed Concept Cat videos for all the level 2 concepts. An example for ‘through’ is below. It is taken from Word Aware 2: Teaching Vocabulary in the Early Years by Stephen Parsons and Anna Brannigan and provides you with a chance to take a look inside this much loved resource. The Word Aware early years approach is based on the same theory as the original Word Aware resource but is adapted for the Early Years.

At Thinking Talking we focus on what works in the classroom to support children’s development of speech, language and communication. Fun with words: Big Brain (I think with my big brain something that is (meaning clue) and it starts with a (letter clue) In July 2014, I went on the Word Aware training delivered by Anna Branagan to see if the strategies could be used within SEN intervention groups. However it soon became apparent that all of our children would benefit from the approaches used! The training was very informative and focused on many aspects of vocabulary teaching and learning. It gave lots of practical activities and games to support the acquisition of vocabulary and to enable children to develop ways of working out what words mean. We also felt that these methods would build on the Read, Write, Inc ‘power words’ strategy that was already embedded in Key Stage 1. Language for Behaviour and Emotions’ has been developed with Melanie Cross. This practical, interactive resource is designed to be used by professionals who work with children and young people who have Social, Emotional and Mental Health needs and Speech,Language and Communication needs. Word of the day or week– as a family see how many times you can use your target word in a meaningful way during the week. The only rules are the sentence must make sense and fit into your conversation.This course is suitable for Speech and Language Therapists, Class Teachers, curriculum co-ordinators, specialist teachers, Head teachers, SENCOs and Educational Psychologists. Understand concepts in subjects such as maths and science • Develop reading comprehension • Write expressively • Succeed academically and in life. Teaching covers phonological sound, syntactic grammar and semantic meaning. In other words, we will be teaching the sound and initial letters of the word; what word class it is (for example, a noun, adjective, adverb, verb) including how the word is structured in a sentence; and what the word means. Children will have access to dictionaries to look up the word, they will consider synonyms and will create their own sentences with the word to consolidate meaning. Other activities used include: word raps, word songs, acting out the word, discussing prefixes and suffixes, symbols or pictures, spelling of the word, syllables, rhyme, physically experiencing the word (where possible), using objects, links to what the children already know and identifying related situations that the word does not apply to. Step-on words – these are words that are very specific to the topic but are not so important for understanding the topic and are less likely to come up frequently. This free chapter will guide teachers on how they can support vocabulary development in all children. It introduces a structured framework called Word Aware, explaining the theory behind the approach, the key principles of effective vocabulary teaching and how it can be implemented in the classroom. It also includes activities that can be put into practice immediately.