Developing Listening, Attention and Communication Skills
To ensure that children are ready for the more focused learning in Reception children need to be able to listen in a range of situations, give attention to what people are saying and use language to convey their thoughts, ideas and feelings as well as making sure their needs are understood.
Below are some ideas fort activities to develop children's skills in these areas.
What can you hear?
Ask your child to close their eyes for one minute and list
everything they can hear: a clock ticking, birdsong, cars...
Traffic Lights
In the game ‘Traffic Lights’, you say a colour and children do
an action. Once they’ve mastered red for stop and green for go,
introduce new colours and actions, such as orange for turn
around and blue for touch the ground.
Deliberate Mistakes
Get nursery rhymes deliberately wrong – “Humpty Dumpty
sat on the sofa” or “Jack and Jill went up the escalator”.
Children love to spot the mistake and put it right.
Learning Sounds
Please keep learning and practise the sounds we have been learning
s a t p i n
You can help your child by collecting some objects with the same initial sounds from around your home, e.g. pepper, pan, potato, pasta.
Ask your child to sort them into all the things that begin with p, i or n
You can also practise forming the letters, supporting your child to hold their pencil correctly and start the letters in the correct place.
Make some letter cards and play snap
Find the letters on packaging on foods, e.g. p for pasta, n for noodles.