Do you talk at the dinner table? Do you have a dinner table?
Before playstations and sky, we all used to have dinner as a family at the table and we all talked. It might not have always been productive or positive talk but as a family we talked.
In my twenty years of teaching, one of the most notable changes I have noticed is the decline in the oral language skills of 5 year olds. We can then translate this into a decline in the written language skills our young people bring to school.
The more we talk to our children at a young age (or at any age) the more skills they develop, the better prepared they are, the greater their vocabulary etc.
I realise our lives are busier now than they were 20 years ago, which makes it even more important that we make the time to talk. Those years before our children start school are the formative years, we cannot get them back either.
