Did your school take part in no pens day today?

George being excited!

It was officially a day when schools should not use pens, rather the children talk and listen to mark the September theme for the Hello campaign. Unfortunately, as with everything the take up for this was not brilliant. In fact of the 10 schools to whom I mentioned it, only one took up the idea. St Peters C E School in Hixon bravely decided to go pen-less! My son was really excited at the prospect and was actually looking forwards to going to school (he's not the most keen under normal circumstances, which is nothing to do with the excellent school he attends, I might add!)

On the way home we had a great chat about what it must be like to be unable to speak or to have difficulty understanding what is said to you. Although he is well aware that as a speech and language therapist, I work with children with problems he had not really thought about the implications for the individuals concerned. If today has made just a few more children think about how dreadful it must be then it has been a success in my book. After all 1 in every 7 has a specific difficulty while 'many, many more' (Gross 2010) will be experiencing a delay which will hinder written language learning.

Join in with the activities of the Hello campaign at www.hello.org.uk