At Our Lady & St Patrick's, children in Key Stage Two learn to speak Spanish, through weekly lessons with our Spanish Teacher!

Planning & Progression in Spanish 

Scheme of Work - Year 4 to Year 6

Progression of Skills in Languages

End of Year Expectations (National Curriculum)

National Curriculum Programme of Study - Languages

Our Spanish Lessons
 

We employ a professional Spanish teacher, who works with children in Years 4 to 6 to deliver weekly Spanish lessons. These lessons include a variety of techniques to encourage the children to have an active engagement with the new language, including games, role-play, action songs and LOTS of speaking and listening!

Lessons are carefully planned and differentiated to allow for progression in children's understanding from Year 4 to Year 6.  The lessons are fun and engaging, with a key focus on speaking and listening, and covering a range of spoken and written work in Spanish.

During lessons, and in our planning, we prioritise listening, responding and speaking skills, supported by the acquisition of simple reading and writing skills. 

Ultimately, we want our to children develop positive attitudes to other languages and, thereby, to other cultures and countries, as they grow and discover more about the wider world. An understanding of other languages is a key skill - for life!

Achievements & Events

We have been awarded the 'International School Award' by the British Council

Celebrating the Day of The Kings

On the evening of January 5th every year, Spanish towns and cities are given over to the colourful parades of the Dia de los Reyes, or the Kings' Day – a celebration of the arrival of the three wise men in Bethlehem after Jesus' birth.

For many families, Three Kings Day is as big a celebration as Christmas Day. It's customary to gather with friends and family to celebrate, often by opening gifts, playing music, and sharing a large meal together.

Working with a Spanish School

We have established a link with a primary school in Spain, which has given our children a real purpose for their new language skills, and is further enhancing their intercultural awareness and understanding.

For the last two years, our Spansih Teacher worked with our Year 6 children to make Christmas cards, celebrating Britain and our local area of The Lake District, to send to children in Spain.

This year, every class made Christmas cards with a British theme, and some children also made traditional, handmade gifts at home, to send to our friends in Spain! 

The Spanish children were delighted to receive our Christmas Cards, gifts and messages and have replied with lovely cards and messages of their own!

The whole school made Christmas cards and gifts to send to our friends in Spain! 

Vision Statement - Modern Foreign Languages

At Our Lady & St Patrick's, we believe that the learning of a foreign language provides a valuable educational, social and cultural experience for pupils.  

Pupils develop communication and literacy skills that lay the foundation for future language learning.  They develop linguistic competence, extend their knowledge of how language works and explore differences and similarities between the foreign language (Spanish, in our case) and English.  

Learning another language raises awareness of our multi-lingual and multi-cultural world and introduces an international dimension to pupils’ learning, giving them an insight into their own culture and that of others.

The learning of a foreign language provides a medium for cross-curricular links and for reinforcement of knowledge, skills and understanding developed in other subjects. 

We will teach children to:

• listen attentively to spoken language and show understanding by joining in and responding
• explore the patterns and sounds of language through songs and rhymes and link the spelling, sound and meaning of words
• engage in conversations; ask and answer questions; express opinions and respond to those of others; seek clarification and help
• speak in sentences, using familiar vocabulary, phrases and basic language structures
• appreciate stories, songs, poems and rhymes in the language
• broaden their vocabulary and develop their ability to understand new words that are introduced into familiar written material, including through using a dictionary
• write phrases from memory, and adapt these to create new sentences, to express ideas clearly
• describe people, places, things and actions orally and in writing  
• understand basic grammar appropriate to the language being studied, including (where relevant): feminine, masculine and neuter forms and the conjugation of high-frequency verbs; key features and patterns of the language; how to apply these, for instance, to build sentences; and how these differ from or are similar to English.  

Attainment & Assessment 

We use the ‘Framework for Languages’ as a tool for assessment, assessing the different strands of language learning on a termly basis.

We use the following documents (published above) to inform our assessment of children's learning in Spanish:

• Progression of skills in MFL (throughout Key Stage Two)
• National Curriculum year group expectations for MFL