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English: Unlocking a World of Opportunity
We believe literacy and communication are key life skills that open up a world of opportunity. Our broad and rich English curriculum is designed to provide children with this essential key, empowering them to communicate effectively and creatively.
We foster a deep love of reading across our school, ensuring all children enjoy and appreciate literature's rich variety. Our goal is to equip every pupil with a strong command of the spoken and written word, nurturing their love of literature through widespread reading for enjoyment. We encourage children to see no limits to what they can achieve within and beyond the classroom through the power of English.
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French: Exploring Language & Culture
We are dedicated to preparing our children for their next steps and the wider world through language learning. Studying French provides a unique opportunity for children to:
- Increase understanding of their own language and explore a new one.
- Broaden their cultural understanding and self-confidence.
- Reinforce fluency and understanding of grammar, syntax, and sentence structure—invaluable skills for life.
Learning a modern foreign language prepares children to participate in our rapidly changing world, where global communication is increasingly vital. With millions of speakers worldwide, French is the second most widely spoken and taught language after English, making it an excellent choice for fulfilling the National Curriculum's commitment to language learning for ages 7-11.
Our Aims:
We believe effective MFL teaching must be engaging, interactive, and stimulating. Using 'Language Angels,' our teachers ensure children:
- Understand and respond to spoken and written French from authentic sources.
- Speak with increasing confidence, fluency, and spontaneity, improving pronunciation and intonation.
- Write at varying lengths for different purposes, using learned grammatical structures.
- Discover and develop an appreciation for French literature.
Subject Content (Key Stage 2):
Our French curriculum balances spoken and written language, laying foundations for Key Stage 3. The focus is on practical communication, enabling pupils to understand and share ideas, facts, and feelings on familiar topics using their knowledge of phonology, grammar, and vocabulary.
Pupils will be taught to:
- Listen attentively and respond to spoken language.
- Explore language patterns through songs and rhymes, linking spelling, sound, and meaning.
- Engage in conversations, ask and answer questions, express opinions, and seek clarification.
- Speak in sentences using familiar vocabulary and basic structures, with accurate pronunciation.
- Present ideas orally to various audiences.
- Read carefully and understand simple French writing, appreciating stories, songs, poems, and rhymes.
- Broaden vocabulary and understand new words, including using a dictionary.
- Write phrases from memory, adapting them to create new sentences.
- Describe people, places, things, and actions orally and in writing.
- Understand basic grammar, including gender, verb conjugation, and how French structure compares to English.
Oracy and Literacy Skills Development:
- Year 3: Strong emphasis on developing listening skills, followed by speaking, with immersion in vocabulary learning at the word level.
- Year 4: Focus shifts to basic French grammar (word classes, agreements, verb forms), sentence construction, and understanding pronunciation implications.
- Year 5: Emphasis on fundamental reading and writing skills rooted in phonics, using bilingual dictionaries, creating more complex spoken sentences, and writing with frames (nouns, verbs, adjectives, conjunctions).
- Year 6: Developing performance skills, constructing complex spoken and written sentences, and supervised dictionary use for vocabulary acquisition.
All these skills are supported by a strong understanding of phonics, enabling children to sound out and spell words accurately, fostering independent learning.