This case study from Margaret Macmillan Primary School
focusses on communication and language
and expressive arts and design,
as well as a range of
other areas of learning.
The child I'm going to be talking about today is a child
who did reach the early learning goals
for all areas by the end of the year.
This child is a girl
who does have English as an additional language,
as the main language
spoken at home is Punjabi.
So, what sort of words and phrases
did she use at the beginning of the year?
So, she would just use one or two words
and gestures to really make herself
known and communicate with us,
she wasn't using really full sentences in September.
This curriculum has given us
so much more opportunity to be
with the children and engage
with the children.
Have you seen that
that's helped with the impact in her
speaking and listening this year?
For this girl, that massive focus really helped,
and she was able to reach those outcomes
by the summer term.
And we were able to see this
during all the opportunities that we provide
for our children to really talk and practise
holding those conversations really.
In the summer term, I did notice that she was talking
more in full sentences,
so she’d talk about what
her favourite food was,
and she’d talk to the other children
about their favourite food.
During lunch times, we're lucky enough
to have all the adults in early years
to go into the dining hall
and sit with the children
and really speak to them,
and she would say things to me like,
“Miss I've got pizza and chips today.
Pizza is my favourite”
and “Yesterday my dad
got me a pizza from the takeaway.”
And that's really good that she was able
to use the word yesterday
in the correct place.
How do you think that that matches
to the speaking early learning goal?
Because we saw it on a daily basis,
we could see that she was able
to use those correct tenses.
She was able to link it to her own experiences
and also engage in that back and forth with her teachers,
but also her peers as well.
She enjoyed listening to stories read by other teachers
and also exploring the books
that we have in our reading area.
Story time has such emphasis in our school
that we read the same book for a week
to help the children grasp
the understanding of the story
and the new vocab.
We then read the book again
to the children in smaller groups again
to give them a further
understanding of the vocabulary,
but also to give them an opportunity
to ask questions about the story.
One of the books we read was Little Red,
I read it to the whole class.
And then this girl took herself off
to the DT area after the story
and used the equipment to make a basket
just like the character
does in the story.
And then we saw her
and take the basket to the home corner
and fill it with the pretend food we have.
And then she got her friends one to be
the grandma, one to be the wolf,
and then they had great fun
acting out the story.
And was she working and playing co-operatively?
She was leading the play
in terms of what they did next,
but she would listen
to the other children
and listen to their opinions
and share the conversation.
When it got close to Eid,
they talked about how they'd celebrated
previously and talked
about what they did during the day
and one of the things that she said was,
“My brother goes to Mosque
to read the Eid prayer.”
They talked about different family members
that would come to visit them
during the day and talked about
whether they came from Bradford
or whether they lived further away.
And those really match
to the understanding the world.
As well as decorating the home corner,
and having the clothes
we start doing Mehndi patterns.
So initially she would put Mehndi on her own hands
and also with her friends
and they talked about the different patterns
that they had on their hands, as well as what
their grown ups had at home.
From that, we could see her working cooperatively,
taking turns,
really speaking and listening
to her friend's ideas as well
so that they could create
this sort of end goal.
So that really shows that through the year,
her speaking has really improved
with everything you've put in place.
Absolutely yeah.
She could create her own Mehndi pattern.
So using different colours
and different materials
such as matchsticks, cotton buds
and thin and thick paintbrushes.
When she started using the matchsticks,
she really struggled to use them,
but she did keep trying.
She decided that the cotton buds
were the best
for the outcome that she wanted.
So she said,
“I like the cotton buds the best
because they keep the paint on them.”
So she kept trying
and she didn't give up?
Yes, she did yeah.
This child is meeting the
level of development expected
for all the areas of learning discussed.