Curriculum Intent
At Charlwood Village Primary School we teach our children Spanish to generate a fascination for words and how language works, a wider curiosity about the peoples and cultures of Spanish -speaking countries and the foundational knowledge to support confident communication in Spanish.
Essential Knowledge
We teach three core strands (The Three Pillars) of essential knowledge:
Early Years
In Early Years, Spanish is taught through interactive mediums such as rhymes, songs and stories. Pupils are encouraged to make connections through own contexts. Reception pupils will learn greetings and other conversational basics.
Key Stage 1
Key Stage 1 pupils build on their reception learning by adding more conversational basics, numbers to 20, days of the week, and colours to their known vocabulary. Pupils continue to enjoy stories and songs - both new and familiar – in the context of a foreign language. Learning this vocabulary early put pupils in a good position before entering Key Stage 2.
In line with the National Curriculum Programmes of Study, our children learn to:
Implementation
Our KS2 children have a weekly Spanish lesson of 30 minutes. In addition they re-visit and deepen their learning for 5-10 minutes where possible with structured language tasks that practise retrieval, improve retention and embed learning in long-term memory. Further opportunities to recycle key vocabulary (e.g. numbers) and develop children’s confidence are often built into classroom routines including greetings, providing instructions, stating lunch preferences, registration, rewards and praise on a more regular basis, even just for a few minutes in the school day e.g. when children are lining up.
We use the Rachel Hawkes resources for a detailed scheme of work with audio-enabled resources for every lesson. Teachers may, if they wish, adapt the resources to support active engagement and meet different learning styles for different cohorts of children.
Assessment
Children are continuously assessed on the knowledge they are taught in lessons, whenever they are called upon to understand and/or produce language, without reference to resources. Periodically they complete achievement tests in phonics, vocabulary and grammar covering all modalities (i.e. listening, speaking, reading and writing), which assess the specific knowledge they have been taught. Their progress and attainment is categorised in the following way, using our school tracking system:
At Charlwood Village Primary School we teach our children Spanish to generate a fascination for words and how language works, a wider curiosity about the peoples and cultures of Spanish -speaking countries and the foundational knowledge to support confident communication in Spanish.
Essential Knowledge
We teach three core strands (The Three Pillars) of essential knowledge:
- Phonics – the key components of the sound-writing relationship
- Vocabulary – a set of the most frequently used words
- Grammar – the essential building blocks required to create simple sentences independently (including gender of nouns, singular and plural forms, adjectives (place and agreement), and the conjugation of key verbs)
- Develop linguistic and communicative competence
- Extend their knowledge of how language works
- Explore similarities and differences between Spanish, any heritage languages our children have, and English.
Early Years
In Early Years, Spanish is taught through interactive mediums such as rhymes, songs and stories. Pupils are encouraged to make connections through own contexts. Reception pupils will learn greetings and other conversational basics.
Key Stage 1
Key Stage 1 pupils build on their reception learning by adding more conversational basics, numbers to 20, days of the week, and colours to their known vocabulary. Pupils continue to enjoy stories and songs - both new and familiar – in the context of a foreign language. Learning this vocabulary early put pupils in a good position before entering Key Stage 2.
In line with the National Curriculum Programmes of Study, our children learn to:
- Listen and show understanding by joining in and responding
- Link the sound, spelling and meaning of words
- Read aloud with accurate pronunciation
- Read and show understanding of phrases and simple texts
- Speak in sentences
- Describe people, places, things in speech and writing
- Ask and answer questions
- Express opinions
- Write phrases from memory
- Adapt phrases to create new sentences
- Use a dictionary
- can name and locate on a map countries where Spanish is spoken
- know the key geographical features of Spain, including continent, surrounding seas and oceans, main mountains and rivers, capital city
- know the name and some detail about at least one festival or tradition from Spain
- know at least one typical food from Spain
Implementation
Our KS2 children have a weekly Spanish lesson of 30 minutes. In addition they re-visit and deepen their learning for 5-10 minutes where possible with structured language tasks that practise retrieval, improve retention and embed learning in long-term memory. Further opportunities to recycle key vocabulary (e.g. numbers) and develop children’s confidence are often built into classroom routines including greetings, providing instructions, stating lunch preferences, registration, rewards and praise on a more regular basis, even just for a few minutes in the school day e.g. when children are lining up.
We use the Rachel Hawkes resources for a detailed scheme of work with audio-enabled resources for every lesson. Teachers may, if they wish, adapt the resources to support active engagement and meet different learning styles for different cohorts of children.
Assessment
Children are continuously assessed on the knowledge they are taught in lessons, whenever they are called upon to understand and/or produce language, without reference to resources. Periodically they complete achievement tests in phonics, vocabulary and grammar covering all modalities (i.e. listening, speaking, reading and writing), which assess the specific knowledge they have been taught. Their progress and attainment is categorised in the following way, using our school tracking system:
- At Expected
A child has learnt and retained the majority of phonics, vocabulary and grammar knowledge taught this term - Greater Depth
- Working Towards
| KS2 Modern Foreign Languages Expectations |
