Learning a foreign language provides an opening to other cultures, fosters pupils’ curiosity and deepens their understanding of the world. Children should be enabled to express their ideas and thoughts in another language and understand and respond to its speakers. Language teaching should provide the foundation for learning further languages at secondary school.
At Pensilva, Spanish is the foreign language taught to all KS2 children. The children listen to spoken Spanish and show understanding by joining in and responding. They explore the patterns and sounds of Spanish through songs and rhymes and link the spelling, sound and meaning of words. Children are encouraged to engage in conversations, ask and answer questions, express opinions and respond to those of others. Children are taught to speak in sentences, using familiar vocabulary, phrases and basic language structures. Children develop accurate pronunciation and intonation so that others understand when they are reading aloud or using familiar words and phrases. In upper KS2, children are taught to write phrases from memory and adapt these to create new sentences to express ideas clearly.
We use the 'Language Angels' online programme to support the teaching of Spanish at Pensilva.
- exploring the countries of Europe and the languages spoken in each
- learning about Switzerland from our Swiss students
- taking part in quizzes testing their knowledge
- saying 'hello' to each other in a wide range of languages including Polish, Italian, Latvian, Spanish, French, Swedish and Romanian
- learning how to say, read and write the date in Spanish
- exploring and matching German and English words and phrases