Oakington Manor Primary School

Intent:

At Oakington Manor Primary school, Spanish is taught from Reception to Y6. As a school community we believe that the early acquisition of a foreign language enhances and reinforces the learning and development of all other areas of the curriculum.  Many of our children are bilingual and in teaching Spanish we continue to harness a love and understanding of other languages and cultures. Our school’s rich and diverse ethnic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds, along with the opportunity to learn Spanish, serves to respect and celebrate our unique identity as a school and helps to better prepare our children to be productive citizens in an increasingly global and competitive world.

Our children enjoy and build elementary skills of spoken language through song and story and, later on, develop confidence and greater fluency in speaking, listening, reading and writing skills. The schemes of work we use is Clare Seccombe​’s Lightbulb Languages, which is adapted to incorporate the school’s wider curriculum.  The schemes cover all the major cornerstones of the programme of study for Modern Foreign Languages and crucially have retained the aspect of intercultural understanding within its philosophy and planning.

Curriculum Implementation:

Speaking and Listening

The children will:

• Encounter a range of situations, audiences and activities designed to develop competence, accuracy and confidence in speaking and listening

• Develop their oral abilities at their own levels

• Develop listening and comprehension skills through a variety of means to include both reciprocal and non-reciprocal situations

• Be able to express opinions, articulate feelings and formulate appropriate responses to increasingly complex instructions and questions.

• Produce short presentations, which involve speaking in Spanish, at their own level.

Reading

The children will be given opportunities to:

• Read stories for enjoyment and to practice vocabulary and linguistic structures

• Read stories to gain awareness of the structure of written Spanish and begin to learn the grapheme-phonic relationships.

•  Read in other contexts, e.g. magazines, comic books, audio transcripts, posters etc.

Writing

The children will be given opportunities to:

• Copy/write high frequency words in KS2, e.g. days, months, name, age etc.
• Write sentences/phrases from memory
• Develop short texts using writing frames
• Produce short presentations with a partner or peer group

Intercultural Understanding

The children will be given opportunities to learn about the culture of the countries where Spanish is spoken.

Language Learning Skills and Knowledge about Language

The children will build up their skills, which will later be applied to learning an additional language. These skills also reinforce the understanding of their own language and how it works, making links with grammatical structures, vocabulary and its etymology.

Curriculum Impact:

• By the end of KS2 children will understand simple spoken and written language, to speak aloud and take part in short conversations and to write short paragraphs on areas learnt.
• Have and insight or awareness of other cultures and have an idea about how languages work and how to learn them.
• Become confident users and learners of a new language with an international outlook which stems from greater knowledge and understanding of other cultures. 
• In teaching Spanish to our pupils we are laying the seeds for their future language learning in either Spanish or other languages and therefore, laying the seeds to a bigger and wider world of experience and opportunity.

Children will also be able to:

• ask and answer questions
• use correct pronunciation and intonation
• memorize words
• interpret meaning
• understand basic grammar
• use dictionaries
• work in pairs and groups, and communicate in the other language
• look at life in another culture
• Read short stories or passages in a variety of mediums
• Write short passages on various topics in the target language