Introducing and exposing children to a wide range of words to increase their communication and language skills is a key focus for most settings. The ‘word gap’ between children who have been exposed to a lot of words and have good verbal communication skills compared with the children who have had less exposure to conversations in their home environment and the negative impact this has which continues throughout their school education is well documented.
To help close the word gap by introducing children to new words I find taking children outside the boundaries of the setting increases the potential of introducing and using new words in the correct context. It also helps the child connect the word to a real and often hands on experience which provides a meaningful context to the word.
As adults we can use our memory of past experiences to know what certain words mean but for a child in autumn finding a conker and learning that the shell is prickly or spiky and they need to be careful when touching it as otherwise it can hurt might be a completely new experience.
Recently my setting caught a bus to visit the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden and we were talking on our journey about what we could see out of the window on our way. Sitting upstairs having left the folded the buggy downstairs was a different experience as we could look our and down. When we could see a bridge we wondered if we would fit under it, thankfully we did. We also made sure to notice the red traffic lights and told the driver when to stop and when they turned green again said go and reminded the driver not to crash! I made a note of some of the words which we used during the trip which we may or may not have had reason to use in the setting.
The list included; bus, omnibus, cobbles, steep (stairs), upstairs, wobbly, bumpy, driver, big wheel, enormous, badge, museum, sit, ticket, charging, plug in, electricity, tram, steam train, underground train, tube, carriage, poo, ambulance, hospital, traffic lights, stop, go, Christmas tree, Santa, Reindeer, Sleigh.
The words we used on our outing were then brought back into the setting as we were talking, recounting and remembering our experience. As could be expected some of the conversation was around “neigh neigh poo” as it was a highlight for one of the children, but it was also a way to engage the child in a conversation about what they remembered from the trip.