Understanding more keywords

Speech and language therapy

﻿Hello, everybody. My name's Emma, and welcome to today's lesson. I'm looking forward to today's session and I hope you are too. I can't wait to get started, but before we do, just a quick reminder. We here at Oak are here to support any approaches you might already be using and any work you might have already been set. We know this lesson is going out to so many different children and families, so if you're not sure or have any questions, please do contact your child's school or use your speech and language therapy team. In today's session, we'll be carrying on thinking about information words. We started this in lesson seven. Together, we'll do some thinking about how the adults can help you to follow more information words in your everyday activities and play, and we'll also have a go following some instructions. Throughout all of the activities today, I'll be sharing some hints and tips with adults, so that they can help you to develop your understanding of language. So before we begin, you'll need a few things. You'll need some dress up clothes and some stacking blocks, if you've got them. Ideally, as many different colours as you have. Adults, you'll need some writing equipment and the downloadable resource available on the Oak website with this lesson. Make sure you're in a quiet place where you won't be disturbed for the lesson. Turn of any distractions or notifications that you might have running on your device, and then make sure that you and your adult are seated comfortably. When you're ready, let's begin. Let's start by doing some talking and thinking about understanding more words. As we covered in lesson seven, key words, or information words, are the words that carry meaning. Pause the video here to get yourself ready. You're going to have a go at the game Simon Says. Pause on the next page, where I've put some symbols for doing words and naming words for your game. Have a few minutes playing Simon Says, and then when you've finished, come back to the video and press Play to continue the lesson. Pause on this page to play Simon Says. When we're working on supporting children to understand more information words, what we want to be very careful of is that activities don't become a test. We can make sure that when we're giving two or more information words to our children that we wait and give them plenty of time to process the information and organise a response. If it doesn't seem like the child is independently able to understand and follow the information words, then we can scaffold their understanding. This means we can do certain things to support our child to experience success. The first thing we could do is give choices. By giving two choices, one that clearly is the object, or the action, or the accurate following of the information words, and then one that's not, we're helping the child to narrow down their response. We can also reinforce the information words that we're using by providing visuals of the key words that we're saying. And we can make sure that we create an errorless learning opportunity. So if they haven't been able to follow the key words that we said, commenting ourselves. Let's have some dress up time now. Children, we need some items of clothing. These could be fancy dress clothing, or your clothes, or even mum and dad's. Adults, let's practise using two information words in our play. When you've had five or so minutes playing dress up, come back to the video and press Play to continue. The more key words that we add into a task, the more parts of information there are. And we need to be very careful that the more bits of information we include, the more demanding this is on the child's memory and understanding of language. When we begin working on following two key words, we need to avoid concepts that we know the child doesn't have a secure understanding of. As we've talked about over the last few sessions, any kind of language games that we're playing want to be enriching, fun, and motivating. Start with familiar words that we know the child understands and then model any new words that we're introducing. We really don't want this to be a test, and we really don't want to be introducing new key words that the child doesn't understand without any kind of scaffolding or support to help them get there. Remember, children learn words when they hear and see adults using them, so we need to be showing children key words and following key words ourselves first. Pause the video here to have a little game of building blocks. See if you can ask each other for different coloured blocks, and remember, use visual strategies, like symbols, if you need to reinforce the key word. When you've finished, come back to the video and press Play to continue with the rest of the lesson. As I've said, the more words that we add into an instruction, the more demand on memory. Visual strategies are really helpful to reinforce key words. So for every key word that we use in a sentence, we could have a symbol or a picture to reinforce that and really help the language stick for the child. Let's play a quick game of Supermarket. We're going to need some everyday items that you would buy from a shop. You might find them in the kitchen, but just have a look around the house and see what you can gather up. Label the items out on a table, maybe start with four, but you could work up to more if you like. Your adult is going to give you two things that they want you to find and buy. Adults, remember, we can use visual strategies to reinforce the items that we're asking the child to find, and therefore scaffold them to understand two key words. As we've said, we want to avoid activities like this becoming a test. It creates pressure, and it's not what we're after. We want to create a language-rich environment where children are accessing words in fun-filled, natural games. Always make sure that we are modelling, labelling, and commenting to provide children with the scaffolds to understand new words. Words that are reinforced through multisensory approaches, like pictures and symbols, are much more likely to stick to. Well, that brings us to the end of today's lesson, but a really big well done on all the fantastic work you've done today on understanding words. If you'd like, you could ask your parent or carer to take a picture of some of the activities that you've been completing and show this to your teacher at school, so that they can see the wonderful progress that you're making with your words. You could also ask your parent or carer to send a picture of this to @OakNational on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, so I can see some of the fantastic activities that you've been working on too. Well, all that's left for me to say is thank you, but take care, and enjoy the rest of your learning today, bye-bye.

Understanding more keywords

Understanding more keywords

These resources will be removed by the end of the Spring Term 2026.

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