Oracy

Our Vision for Oracy at Penn Wood:

At Penn Wood, we want all of our children to be confident, articulate and agile communicators. We want every child to feel empowered to use their voice, knowing that it is their right to be heard. We celebrate and promote linguistic diversity and place high value on oracy in all languages. A high-quality oracy curriculum permeates all areas of school life and gives children the skills that open doors to possibilities, both in education and beyond.

Voice 21

Penn Wood have committed to excellence in oracy through engagement in a long-term project with Voice 21. V21 are a national charity whose aim is to equip educators with the oracy expertise to transform learning and life chances through talk.

What are we working on?

Through our work with Voice 21, we have honed the following oracy approaches this year:

• We have explored the Oracy Framework to understand the physical, linguistic, cognitive and social and emotional skills that enable effective discussion and communication.
• This framework has enabled teachers to plan for ample opportunities to engage in oracy across the curriculum.
• Classes have established Discussion Guidelines which provide a child-friendly framework for excellence in oracy.
• Our work on sentence stems has been further developed through Voice 21's 'Talk Tactics' which support us in teaching children how to make 'conversational moves' in a skilled and confident manner.
• Voice 21's Springboards for Talk have also been introduced to support in the design of oracy based tasks.