Spanish

Intention

At Ling Bob School, we aim to give the children in our care as wide a range of opportunities and experiences as possible.  We acknowledge the influence that Europe has on our lives and as the UK is becoming an increasingly multi-cultural society, we have a duty to provide our children with an understanding of other cultures and languages.

At Ling Bob, we believe that learning a language enriches the curriculum helping to create enthusiastic learners and to develop positive attitudes to language learning throughout life.  The skills, knowledge and understanding gained contribute to the development of children’s oracy and literacy and to their own culture and those of others.  We believe that the earlier a child is exposed to a foreign language, the faster the language in question is acquired. We aim to prepare children for the KS3 language curriculum and to facilitate the learning of other foreign languages later in life. 

 In Practice

We teach Spanish to children from Year 3 to Year 6.  These classes benefit from a specialist Spanish teacher who teaches each class for 40 minutes per week.  The school uses the BBC Languages scheme of work to support the teaching and learning of Spanish which has been adapted to the context of our school and the needs of our children.  This provides clear progression for the development of speaking and listening and vocabulary acquisition. 

A variety of the following techniques are used to encourage children to have an active engagement with Spanish:

• Games - in order to develop vocabulary through repetition, reading, writing, speaking and listening skills.
• Role-play-relating to situations that children may find themselves in the future.
• Action songs and rhymes-to develop phonetic skills, memory skills and to further vocabulary.
• Puppets and toys-to develop communication skills.
• Mime-to associate vocabulary with kinesthetic learning.
• Reading and writing quality materials.
• Listening to conversations between native speakers.

We make the lessons as engaging and enjoyable as possible as we realise that this approach serves to develop a positive attitude in the children to the learning of  Spanish.

Although Spanish is taught discretely, we try our utmost to integrate this subject into our everyday routines such as answering the daily register and giving simple instructions in Spanish.  Pupils also have the opportunity to share their learning in end of term assemblies where children perform taught songs and rhymes.

 Outcome

Through the high quality teaching of Spanish taking place, we will see the impact of the subject in the following ways:

• Children will be able to communicate with each other in Spanish.
• Children will become aware that a language has a structure and that the structure differs from one language to another.
• Children will develop their language through the four key skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing.
• Children will enrich their language learning by developing an understanding of the Spanish culture.
• Children will learn how language skills can be applied to a range of languages.
• Children will transfer to the KS3 MFL curriculum effectively and successfully and will be well prepared to continue and develop their language skills.