Teaching a foreign language at primary school allows children to deepen their understanding of the world and unlocks a world of opportunity for our pupils. Our aim is to foster pupils’ curiosity and deepen their understanding of the world.
It is recognised that many of our children are already fluent in a language other than English when they arrive at the school. Throughout their school life, we celebrate this linguistic diversity and acknowledge the importance of children sustaining the development of their mother tongue with teachers encouraging children to share the languages they know.
We teach to the National Curriculum for Languages focusing on the key concepts of:
As a school, we teach Spanish as our modern foreign language as this is one of the most common taught languages at our local secondary schools. We begin teaching it in year 3 and class teachers deliver the lessons supported by an online programme.
Our Languages curriculum focuses initially on speaking and listening, engaging the children through song, poetry etc. As the children move through the school to years 5 and 6, they will begin to read and write in Spanish.
Each year group’s curriculum builds on the learning from previous years, recognising that, when learning a new language, it is important to revisit past learning regularly to enable the children to remember more and be able to do more in the subject. By the end of year 6, we want our children to have developed the foundations and confidence for continuing to learn languages at secondary school and equipping them to study and work in other countries in their futures.