French

Our chosen language is French.  This is taught by a specialist French teacher to the whole of Key Stage 2. 

Our overall intent is that pupils when they leave Y6 they will have a secure grounding in the 3 pillars of good linguistic education: phonics (and sound-letter correspondences), vocabulary and grammar. Languages are an integral part of the curriculum as they open the mind to other cultures, build cultural capital and liberate from insularity. To be successful in language learning, children need to experience success, have sound knowledge of the French language’s phonetic code, have a secure grasp of the building blocks which enables manipulation of language and being clear about how to make progress.  Working memory limitations means that overloading learners with content will negatively affect the quality of learning: less can be more.  An effective French curriculum includes distributed practice (practising rehearsal of knowledge in short chunks regularly and often) is more effective than massed practice (doing lots of rehearsal in one go).  Our spiral curriculum revisits the 3 pillars throughout the 4 years.   Retrieval practice supports long-term memory development.  This approach is regularly adopted through our use of Building Learning Power and Bloom’s Taxonomy.  Explicit teaching works best with novice learners. Concepts are presented clearly to pupils and explicit links are made to children’s knowledge of grammar in English which is secure.   This supports our pupils through making links between the two languages.

Our golden threads are:  Vocabulary, Grammar, Knowledge about France, Power (linked to History) and the countries within the UK (linked to Geography)

We only teach French in Key Stage 2.  Our pupils enter the 4 year rolling programme at different points; it is important that children have the opportunity to revisit learning in order to help it become ‘sticky knowledge’, to further develop skills when using this knowledge and purposefully recap on learning.   Each level has key phonics, vocabulary and grammar and through our spiral curriculum, this knowledge is revisited and built up on each year.  This approach ensures our curriculum fulfils the distinct needs of our learners, it also supports children in being able to remember more because revisiting learning helps it transfer to the long-term memory. In order to do this effectively, we use the Bloom’s rainbow steps to success to ensure children can use knowledge in a variety of higher order ways appropriate to their stage of learning.  This way of working is successful for our mixed-aged classes.

For Modern Foreign Languages, we follow The Primary French Project scheme of learning.  The documents below show the progressive key learning that takes place in this subject across Key Stage 2.