Languages

Languages
at St Anne’s Primary School

Intent: Why does our Spanish curriculum look like this?

At St Anne’s Catholic Primary School, we offer a relevant, broad, vibrant and ambitious foreign language curriculum designed to inspire and excite our children using a wide variety of topics and themes.  Our chosen core language is Spanish which links to languages taught in our main Catholic feeder secondary school. All KS2 children will be expected to achieve their full potential by encouraging high expectations and excellent standards in their learning – the ultimate aim being that children will feel motivated and able to continue studying languages beyond Key Stage 2.

It is our intention that children develop a genuine interest and positive curiosity about foreign languages, find them enjoyable and stimulating. Learning a second language will also offer children the opportunity to explore relationships between language and identity, develop a deeper understanding of other cultures and the world around them and enhance their awareness of self, others and cultural difference.  

Implementation: How will we achieve this?

Our children follow a carefully structured Spanish curriculum which is designed to ensure children know more, remember more and can do more as they progress through our school. The curriculum is supported by a Spanish Teacher (SLA). Our curriculum is taught using four concept led strands.

·         listening,

·         speaking,

·         reading

·         writing – grammar will be covered in an age-appropriate way across the primary phase

Our curriculum is designed to ensure that the foreign language knowledge is structured to ensure children progressively acquire, use and apply a growing bank of vocabulary, language skills and grammatical knowledge by following age-appropriate topics and themes.  It provides a basis for building blocks of language understanding into more complex, fluent and authentic language use in units of difficulty.

Our Teaching Approach

Spanish is taught weekly to ensure children have opportunities for a sustained period of study and have time to embed and enhance their learning. Detailed medium-term planning supports teaching, ensures continuity and carefully plans for progression and depth. Children have opportunities to use high quality resources and materials to support their learning. The medium-term planning also underpins an appropriate teaching pedagogy for effective quality first teaching in MFL. Children will continuously build on their previous knowledge as they progress in their foreign language learning journey through the primary phase.  Previous language learning will be recycled, revised, recalled and consolidated whenever possible and appropriate. Our children understand the core skills needed to work as a linguist. 

Impact: How will we know that our children are achieving?

By the end of key stage 2, children are expected to know, apply and understand the skills and techniques specified in the Spanish MFL curriculum plan.

Children are assessed using Balance tracking system which identifies clear and progressive end points.  This ensures progress is maintained and end of key stage expectations are met by all children.

Children are assessed termly and a final summative assessment made at the end of the academic year. Children will be assessed as either Emerging, Developing, Secure or Exceeding, in accordance with Age Related Expectations.

In addition, we measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods:

·         A reflection on standards achieved against the planned outcomes;

·         A celebration of learning for each term which demonstrates progression across the school (Curriculum Floor book);

·         Pupil discussions about their learning (Pupil Voice);

·         The annual tracking of standards across the curriculum.