Flora Gardens Primary School

Spanish

Intent

At Flora Gardens, the intention of the Spanish curriculum is to inspire a love of language learning and promote a curious and enthusiastic attitude towards Spanish culture. We intend to equip children with basic conversation skills in order for them to be able to express their ideas and thoughts in Spanish. Alongside this, an exploration of Spanish traditions, art and music will be conducted, in order to equip the children with a well-rounded appreciation of Spanish culture. Through teaching, the skills of reading, listening and writing will also be explored, in order to embed the children’s understanding of the grapheme-phoneme correspondence in Spanish. This will develop the children’s communication skills further, which should equip them with the skills needed to converse in Spanish and hopefully engender a desire to travel to Spanish speaking countries in the future.

Implementation

At Flora Gardens all children work towards learning basic conversation skills, in order for them to be able to introduce themselves and share key facts about themselves and their families in Spanish. Across both key stages, children have a range of opportunities to experience Spanish culture through learning about art, traditions and music. Alongside this, key vocabulary is introduced across each unit ranging from colours and numbers to animals and food. This is paired with a simplistic teaching of grammatical structures in order to enable children to build sentences in Spanish. Information detailing content taught in each year can be found in the Spanish curriculum map. At the end of each unit assessments are carried out to give the teacher leading Spanish assurance that outcomes have been met and the progression of knowledge and skills has been successfully carried out.

The lead teacher plans the following:

A cycle of lessons for each subject, which carefully plans for progression and depth concentrating on the language skills suited to the age group.
A medium term plan which outlines the key vocabulary and skills that will be taught
Regular quizzes in order to promote spaced retrieval and to check for knowledge retention (with a particular focus on vocabulary)
Differentiated tasks for native and high ability students, in order to continue stretching and challenging their application of the Spanish language (across speaking, reading, writing and listening)
Practical art and music activities, related to Spanish culture, which will enhance the learning experience.
Termly pupil voice activities, in order to ensure pupils are able to feed into the planning cycle. This should ensure their enthusiasm and interest in the language is maintained.

Impact

Our Spanish Curriculum is well rounded, dynamic and is planned to promote a love of learning languages. Alongside this, once children have completed the cycle of lessons from year three through to six, they should be capable of communicating confidently in Spanish. We measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods:

Regular discussions with pupils regarding their Spanish learning, including questionnaires
Constant formative assessment through whiteboard tasks, games and quizzes in order to ensure progression and understanding
Termly Spanish Assessments that highlight children who are working below, at and above.
Regular reflection upon lessons conducted by the lead teacher and through discussion with other professionals (following a cycle of plan, do, review).