How is your reception child getting on so far?

If your child started primary school in September, you’ll know that the transition from playgroups, nursery, or being at home with you has been a big one – for both the children and the grown-ups!

The first couple of terms of primary school is all about learning the class routine, making new friends, and following the rules of the school. They’ve made brilliant progress when it’s a lot to learn for those little four and five-year-olds!

If you’ve noticed them being worn out, maybe a bit emotional or overwhelmed at times, it’s all normal – it’s all a lot for your child to process at this young age.

You may have received feedback from your child's teacher or teaching assistants during September to December, and some of this may have been worrying to you.

However, it may be that your child needs a little bit more help with their speech, language and communication skills. After all, the current reception children were toddlers in the pandemic - and this will have affected their development, social interaction, speech and language, varying for each child.

There isn't much research to prove the effect of the pandemic on toddlers, (although there is plenty more on the effect on adults!) but parents with older children will have noticed developmental differences and as therapists, we have definitely noticed a difference in the speech, language, and communication skills of pandemic toddlers – today’s reception children.

Identifying speech, language and communication struggles early on, can really help your child to get the help and support they need, to develop in these areas and help them manage better at school.

It might be that they can’t get teachers and peers to understand what they are saying – which could be caused by a speech difficulty. Once overcome with speech therapy, their school life might become much easier and far less frustrating for them. It could be that they can’t easily understand what’s being asked of them, and so they never really know what’s going on – again, very frustrating for them and this could display as ‘naughty’ or ‘disruptive’ behaviour.

If your child is having any of the following problems at school, an assessment would help to identify if speech, language and communication are behind them. Some parents when they receive this feedback from teachers, think about autism and ADHD, when in actual fact, it could be due to their speech, language and communication development not being where it should be.

Speech, language and communication could be behind the following behaviours:

• Struggling to be understood by teachers and other children
• Behaviour problems in the playground
• Friendship issues
• Unable to share or take turns very well
• Unable to follow simple instructions easily
• Finding routine difficult to follow
• Upset by changes to a usual daily routine

This first year in reception is a big change for children at such a young age, but it changes again in Year 1, as children are moved away from play-based, child-led learning and into a more structured curriculum.

Identifying difficulties now and working to improve them really can set children up very well for being able to make this next transition more easily. If they can understand and be understood, their whole academic journey through school becomes so much more manageable. Left without intervention, some children will find school hard and maybe fall behind – a little bit each year, impacting their GCSE exams.

It's not a time to worry – reception children have the benefit of being so young that help at this early stage will be effective, both at home and at school.

At home, we advise the adults around them to:

• Talk to children a lot – about the day, what’s happened, what’s coming next.
• Use a range of words for the same thing.
• Use words in context – if they come home with a spelling test, use those individual words in a sentence or conversation.
• Read out loud to children and explain any words they don’t know – allow them to interrupt to ask!
• Read for pleasure – find a range of books they like and it’ll be more fun for you all.
• Have a guess at what new words mean – it’s fun and stirs their imagination.
• Talk about what you’ve read – go over the story, talk about your favourite parts of the book.
• Enjoy poetry – there’s some brilliant children’s poetry out there that even the grown-ups will like!
• Tell stories – be creative and make up some stories together!
• Play a word game - choose a word every day/week and try to use it in lots of different ways together.
• Listen to audiobooks – great for listening to together, stopping to look up new words for their meanings.
• Be kind when they get it wrong – try not to correct, just repeat it correctly…they will hear the difference.
• Reduce screen time and replace with chat or reading – computer games are good for problem-solving aspects but not for language development.

Find out about our assessments and speech therapy, or give us a call to ask any question.

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