Find out how we teach MFL at Alexandra Primary School.
We believe that learning a foreign language is a skill for life. It helps pupils to have confidence and to become ‘world citizens’ with further multicultural understanding. In order to achieve this, each class represents a Spanish Speaking country. Children enjoy learning about food, dance festivals and exciting places to do tourism from their class country, as well as practical vocabulary that would help them to maintain simple conversations with a Spanish speaker.
In Key Stage 1
Pupils in Year 1 and 2 are exposed to the Spanish language with a weekly lesson of 30 minutes. Instructions will often be given in Spanish. There are simple songs that they know well.
We use a range of flash cards to play ‘charades’ and help children remember keys questions such as:
Where is…?- ¿Donde está…?
What is the best of…? – ¿Qué es lo major de….?
What is the capital of…?- ¿Cual es la capital de…?
What would you like to eat…? – ¿Qué quieres comer…?
What festivals are there…? – ¿Qué fiestas hay…?
Pupils participate in a weekly lesson of 30 minutes, delivered by our HLTA and native speaker Ruth de la Cruz. The lessons involve a variety of engaging approaches to teaching and learning, including speaking and listening activities, lots of opportunities to role play to consolidate new learning through a variety of authentic material to ensure all pupils are fully engaged. Year 3-6 also do some writing.
Songs
We have a range of Spanish songs that the children from Reception till year 6 are learning at the moment:
Next term we will be learning about family and how to describe them. Click on this link to play the many fun games related to this topic: https://cvc.cervantes.es/ensenanza/mimundo/
Children from year 1 and 2 have fun dancing and playing Spanish games which enhances their listening and speaking skills. If you think that your child would enjoy coming, please come to the office and fill the request form.
Here are the details of our KS2 curriculum:
Speaking
Listen attentively and show understanding by joining in
Explore the sounds of language through songs
Engage in conversations
Seek clarification and help
Speak in sentences, using familiar vocabulary
Develop accurate pronunciation and intonation so that others understand
Present information orally to an audience
Reading
Read carefully and show understanding of words, phrases and simple writing
Appreciate songs in the language
Broaden their vocabulary to understand new words
Writing
Write phrases from memory, and adapt these to create new sentences
Describe people, places, things and actions in writing
Grammar
Understand gender of nouns, definite and indefinite articles
Understand singular and plural forms of nouns
Recognise adjectives
Conjugate key verbs (and make verbs negative)
Use high-frequency sentence-builders, such as connectives, adverbs of time and prepositions of place
