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 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 discrete 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 not only in Spanish, but in a more general way too. 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

With the implementation of the new Language Angel’s scheme of work and the consistency it provides across different year groups, ensures 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, allowing gaps and misconceptions to be identified and addressed during the lessons. Pupil progress is monitored throughout the year, allowing children to succeed at every stage in their Spanish development.

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