Spanish (MFL)

Intent

Languages are a defining characteristic of any culture and it is through learning a language that pupils can truly appreciate the wonderful and diverse world around them. Our aim is to encourage our pupils to develop curiosity, a love and a deeper understanding of languages and other cultures, and to lay firm foundations for further language study in Key Stage 3. We have chosen to teach Spanish as this offers our pupils access to the Spanish-speaking world of over 450 million people and its range of unique customs, history and culture.

While pupils across Key Stage 2 experience Spanish teaching, we have focused our teaching in years4 and 5, to ensure that our pupils have a solid grounding in English phonics, grammar & punctuation and vocabulary & sentence structure before embarking on a new language programme. This will well-support them to understand new Spanish language structures and also allow them to make meaningful linguistic links between Spanish and English. It is our intention that through studying Spanish, grammatical concepts and rules in English will also become clearer. We work closely with our partner school, Jack Hunt Secondary School in the Peterborough Keys Academies Trust, to ensure that our curriculum prepares them well for the demands of their language curriculum, with a view to ensuring that our pupils become life-long language learners; reversing the national trend in language learning decline.

Implementation

Spanish lessons at Longthorpe Primary School are both fun and ambitious for what pupils will learn. They are characterised by a range of activities, such as: songs and rhymes; games; listening, reading and writing tasks; and conversational and role-play tasks. Using the ‘Language Angels’ programme, we have mapped out a range of interesting topics from which we teach key language objectives related to:

Listening to the accurate pronunciation of Spanish words.
Reading in Spanish and being introduced to the Spanish phonetic code, including how accents can change the sound of some letters.
Speaking in Spanish through repetition, opportunities to converse and through asking questions.
Spelling words and writing simple phrases and sentences while learning simple Spanish grammar.
Learning about key cultural events from around the Spanish-speaking world.

Our curriculum is categorised into three ‘Teaching Categories’, ensuring that key skills and knowledge are built on and that pupils learn more complex concepts as they move through the units.

Spanish is taught using Castilian pronunciation. Pupils this will develop their Spanish skills through well-planned weekly lessons, taught by the class teacher (with the support of resources from the Language Angels programme – especially around pronunciation). Each teaching unit is divided into six fully planned lessons with a clearly defined objective. Pupils will progressively acquire, use and apply a growing bank of vocabulary, language skills and grammatical knowledge organised around age-appropriate topics and themes; building blocks of language into more complex, fluent and authentic language skill. Pupils are taught how to listen and read longer pieces of text gradually in Spanish and they will have ample opportunities to speak, listen to, read and write with and without scaffolds, frames and varying levels of support. Pupils will build on previous knowledge gradually as their Spanish lessons continue to recycle, revise and consolidate previously learnt language whilst building on all four language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing.

Spanish (Modern Foreign Language) Roadmap

Key Documents

Entire Spanish Curriculum - PDF Version

To find out more about our curriculum please contact the school office.