Kia ora Bromley whānau. Kō Caroline Cookson ahau. I am a speech and language therapist with the Ministry of Education. I love coming into Bromley School – everyone makes me feel so welcome.  It is a wonderful school community to be a part of.

One of the things I notice about primary aged children’s language is that they make mistakes with their grammar which is often a normal part of their development.  As parents and teachers, it can be tempting to correct them, but we recommend adults to model back the correct sentence form in a way that doesn’t make the child think they’ve done anything wrong (we call this remodelling).  We want children to feel positive about communicating and not embarrassed or ashamed that they’ve got it wrong.  So if they say: “we goed swimming today” you can respond by saying: “wow you went swimming today – that sounds really fun”.  That way they know that you understood what they said AND they also heard you modelling the correct grammar.

When children consistently hear the correct grammar modelled back to the in a meaningful way, they are more likely to learn to use this appropriately themselves.