Dear Parents and Guardians

I hope you have had a good week.

As you know at Nexus we pride ourselves on being an empowering learning focused community. As such the adults are also always learning. Be this from each other in peer collaboration each week or be this through professional learning with external providers. As role models for our learners we are in a privileged position to inspire and influence our community. Recognising we have 55 different nationalities in our learner population we are constantly striving to improve both our cultural understanding and our ability to support learners to bring their home language skills and their cultural identity into their learning. I am currently completing some online learning to support my understanding of leading a bi and multilingual learning community and have been fascinated to learn more around how intertwined language and culture are.

Parents often ask me how they can support their child better; reading and vocabulary building are two key ways. Having a firm foundation in our home language with a diverse and complex range of vocabulary is essential if we are to be successful. We cannot be successful in other languages if we do not have firm foundations in our own. Not understanding a word or concept in our first language makes it incredibly challenging to be able to develop it in a second language. Learners need over 6000 words to transition from foundational language to thinking language. You need 7000 words to make sense of the movie Shrek without relying on the visuals alone and you need 9000 words or more to make sense of most novels. Proficient readers and writers can open the door to more challenging cognitive skills and academic experiences.

Social media is part of modern day life and unfortunately much of it does little to build vocabulary as much is slang and abbreviations. The ability to conjure up whole new worlds through vocabulary and text alone is an impressive skill which authors have been striving to do for years. The most impactful thing we can all do is support learners to have a love of words and reading. Book Week in Term 4 will provide an excellent opportunity to further cement this.

Best wishes

Dr Heather