Spanish
At Carclaze we are committed to ensuring that experience of another language enables children to interpret, create and exchange meaning within and across cultures, through explicit teaching of the National Curriculum.
The 2014 National Curriculum for Modern Foreign Languages aims to ensure that all children:
• Understand and respond to spoken and written language from a variety of authentic sources.
• Are able to speak with increasing confidence, fluency and spontaneity, finding ways of communicating what they want to say, including through discussion and asking questions, and that they are continually improving the accuracy of their pronunciation and intonation.
• Can write at varying length, for different purposes and audiences, using the variety of grammatical structures that they have learnt.
• Discover and develop an appreciation of a range of writing in the language studied.
A high quality languages education should foster children’s curiosity and deepen their understanding of the world. It also helps children develop skills that will open further opportunities later in life. The teaching of Spanish in KS2 provides an appropriate balance of the four skills areas (speaking, listening, reading and writing) as well as intercultural understanding, and lays the foundations for further foreign language teaching at KS3.
Spanish Curriculum Implementation
Children are introduced to Spanish from Year 3 and receive weekly lessons throughout their time in key stage 2. This enables the children to develop early language acquisition skills that facilitate their understanding of the patterns of language and how these differ from, or are similar to, English.
Lessons support the skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing through:
- Children being encouraged to listen attentively to spoken language and respond, joining in with songs, rhymes and games
- The development of an appreciation of a variety of stories, songs, poems and rhymes in Spanish that are delivered through the curriculum content
- Opportunities to orally rehearse new vocabulary and join to form basic sentences
- Applying skills in a written context, such as describing likes/dislikes, describing where they live, who is in their family etc, evidence of which can be found in topic books.
- The use of bi-lingual dictionaries to find and translate vocabulary
The use of cross-curricular links in order to revisit, consolidate and make links with prior learning (e.g. shape and time in maths, grammar and word classes in English)
In order to support the delivery of Spanish at Carclaze, we follow a scheme called 'Language Angels'.
Exposure to Spanish vocabulary and everyday phrases is encouraged in Key Stage 1 throughout the day.