English & Communication
English & Communication at Windmill Hill School is supported across all areas of the curriculum. Our approach to communication develops the functional, receptive and expressive language and communication skills of our students.
Our curriculum is designed to reflect the varying needs of our students and identifies strategies to enable effective communication. Our communication continuum aims to support students in all stages of their communication development and prepare them for adult life. We enable students to communicate their wants and needs in their preferred mode. This means that we support every student in communicating by ensuring that their voices are heard.
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