At Bryony School, our intention is to immerse children into language learning and to develop interest and curiosity through an introduction to the Spanish language from a very early age.
Learning a foreign language provides an opening to other cultures, fosters pupils’ curiosity and deepens their understanding of the world. It helps them to develop communication skills, including key skills of speaking and listening, and extends their knowledge of how language works, helping them to develop their grammar skills.
All children have access to weekly Spanish sessions and our curriculum has been designed to progressively develop skills in Spanish. Lessons are sequenced so that prior learning is considered and opportunities for revision of language and grammatical concepts are built into lessons. Children are encouraged and supported, through a variety of diverse activities, to develop their speaking and listening skills through conversational work, singing activities, role-play and games. As their confidence and skill grows, children record their work through pictures, captions, simple sentences and finally, onto longer and more complex pieces of written work. Many topics are revised or revisited throughout our curriculum with additional skill and challenge to ensure learning becomes ‘sticky’. The lesson structure each week also allows time to revisit the previous week’s knowledge and build upon this.
At Bryony, we assess the impact of our Spanish curriculum through regular monitoring, including formal and informal assessment as well as listening to the voice of our children. We are confident that throughout our Spanish curriculum, we provide our children with a strong foundation of skills ready for the challenges of the secondary language curriculum.