Intent

Learning a foreign language opens up opportunities to explore and celebrate other cultures, potentially different to our own. We believe high quality education in languages fosters children’s curiosity and deepens their understanding of the world. Our Spanish lessons mix opportunities for reading, writing, listening to and speaking another language. Children will begin to speak with increasing fluency and confidence and write at varying lengths, using the different grammatical structures they have learned, giving them a strong foundation to build upon when looking at other foreign languages as they progress into secondary school.

Implementation

At St Gabriel’s, we follow the Language Angels scheme and a Spanish lesson is timetabled weekly. The resources we use are tailored to provide extra challenge or extra support where appropriate. As part of our Spanish lessons, we use interactive and varied resources, with emphasis on helping children’s pronunciation. We also use a range of interactive songs and games designed to consolidate the pupil’s learning.

We approach the teaching and learning of foreign languages like ‘language Lego’. We start with small blocks of language knowledge, increase the number and complexity and encourage pupils to put the blocks together to create complex, adventurous and amazing linguistic structures. In our lessons, we encourage as much verbal communication as possible, which helps develop children’s speaking and listening skills. Our Spanish lessons are interactive, pacey, unique and fun and help foster an enthusiasm for learning new languages as children progress through the school.

Impact

Pupils at St Gabriel’s have a developed a genuine enthusiasm for Spanish. Children enjoy it as a unique kind of lesson.  Pupil’s skills and knowledge are monitored across the year, with assessment of reading, writing, listening and speaking at the end of each unit. This allows gaps and misconceptions to be identified and addressed throughout the school year. This allows children to succeed at every stage in their Spanish development throughout Key Stage 2.

BBC Bitesize KS2 Spanish - https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/subjects/zxsvr82