English & Communication
Literacy underpins work in all curriculum areas, social contexts and personal development.
Literacy across the Curriculum is an essential vehicle for reinforcing and developing English skills in a wider context, such as communication, vocabulary, reading, social skills.
Curriculum Vision:
To equip all learners with confidence, skills, resilience, and high aspirations in order to lead happy, fulfilling lives in an ever-changing world.
Curriculum Drivers:
- ‘Bring Life to Learning and Learning to Life’
- Social Capital
- Quality of Life
Core Values:
Why do we provide a communication curriculum for our learners?
“For those with severe learning difficulties, whether-or-not they have an additional autistic spectrum disorder, effective communication is unlikely to come easily or naturally. Therefore, it is imperative that those working with them put the conditions in place to maximise opportunities for spontaneous communication. We must remember that the motivation to communicate is a key communicative necessity.”
Goldbart (1994) further outlined the key factors in communication as:-
- A means (method) of communicating
- A reason (motivation) to communicate
- Someone to communicate with
- Time — to encourage an independent, rather than a dependent communicator.
The CLL curriculum is a vehicle to introduce, develop, extend and reinforce the following skills: -
Language — including pre-verbal, spoken, receptive and expressive skills,
Understanding information — including establishing communicative intent, reciprocal interaction, social and emotional awareness.
Reading and writing — processing and handling communicative information, including objects of reference, signs, symbols, written word. Reading for enjoyment, comprehension, functional reading and decoding, phonics.
Fundamental to our learners' reading journey, is to develop a love of reading. This could be through developing an interest in books as sensory objects, as functional sources of pleasure, tactile books/magazines or online sources, using sensory stories, sensory engagement, and looking at age appropriate but adapted materials to match developmental ability.
See also Reading at Windmill Hill