Spanish
Curriculum Intent
Our intent is to shape new thinkers linked to the whole school curriculum, the school CHRIST values, KS3 national curriculum & the needs of employers. Our curriculum is intended to be at the CORE of the school life and stands for :
- Communication: people acquire language by communicating with others. Our students will become great communicator when they leave BC.
- Openness: in language we will enable our students to open themselves to other cultures and share their identity with others.
- Relationship: languages create new relationships and build bridges.
- Expertise: our students will be able to become expert linguist by connecting their first language to the taught language and positively responding to mistakes.
We do this by equipping all our students with the knowledge and skills to thrive and succeed in language learning; encouraging and inspiring them with quality first teaching, broadening their awareness of other countries and communities and providing opportunities for participation in a broad range of linguistic and cultural educational experiences.
The ability to communicate in Spanish and having the confidence to use the language is one of the main goals in learning the subject providing the students with life skills that is valuable beyond their school education.
Teaching and Learning
In Spanish we believe in delivering an ambitious yet highly inclusive curriculum to all. Our vision for Teaching & Learning is to ensure all students access the “full” curriculum and learn the breadth of content.
Our staff have high expectations of all pupils and focus on embedding our 3Rs:
- Ready
- Respectful
- Responsible
All lessons focus on embedding the whole school Blue Coat approach:
- Explaining and Modelling
- Do & Practice
- 4forAll Toolkit leading to inclusive practice:
- Key words/Reading
- Use of time
- Chunk and check
- Questioning
- Appropriate verbal, written and visual feedback
Reading is an essential strategy within lessons. You will see staff applying the three reading strategies of:
How can parents help?
- BBC Bitesize Spanish https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/subjects/zfckjxs
- MFL Magic https://www.mflmagic.com/
- A Green Mouse https://agreenmouse.com/
- Regularly check their exercise book and have them to show you something they are proud of
- Test them on their vocab and verb endings – using the list of the high frequency words and the Spanish booklet
- For grammar: get them to teach it to you and explain how it compares in form and use to English. It will show if you child has grasped the key grammatical terms: (adjectives, adverbs, tenses, subject pronouns, articles…)
- Encourage them to speak the language as much as possible, ask your child : “Tell me 3 things you did at school today in Spanish.”, have them to repeat it and ask them to add something new
- Understanding how we learn is essential, share your own learning techniques with them for memorisation, revisions, reading, writing, speaking and listening skills
- Support them with their learning journey and ask them which areas they want to improve on
- Support smart use of resources. Encourage your child to have all of their resources to hand – vocab book, dictionary (traditional or online), as well as their exercise book
- Discourage your child to use online translators. Google Translate or simply inserting lumps of text into an online translate App is not developing any linguistic skills because the language produced is incompatible with the context of the learning and create miscommunication often spotted by the teacher and not by the student
- Provide opportunities for them to use the language for real purposes to build confidence at home: DUOLINGO, with Spanish friends, watching a Spanish version of a film, listening to Spanish music on or watching cartoons in Spanish. At a more advanced level, your child can watch the news on an authentic Spanish channel station (Telemundo/ El Pais / EuroNews / RTVE.es)
- Where possible, support school trips which are tailored to enable students to embrace the foreign language and its cultures.
Enrichment & Experiences
Extra-curricular Activities
- Spanish Club, H10, Thursday 3.15 – 4pm