At Holy Cross Catholic Primary Academy, we believe that the learning of a language provides a valuable educational, social and cultural experience for our children. It helps them to develop wider communication skills, helps to provide a new and broader perspective on the world, encouraging them to understand their own cultures and those of others, which feeds into our whole school ethos. In addition, children’s knowledge of how language works will be developed and lay the foundations for further language learning in future.

 

Children develop their love of language learning and develop skills throughout their time in school.

 

In KS2, children are taught French in weekly sessions by their class teacher using the interactive ‘Rigolo’ programme. Our children learn through active participation in actions, rhymes, stories, song, grammar focus, video clips, sentence structure and dictionary work.

 

Many more creative ways to extend, embed and combine language skills are also used. For example, French language is brought into use for everyday activities such as answering the lunch register and asking for permission to leave the classroom. Classrooms have a French display based on the current unit of learning and areas in the class are labelled in French.

 

Our French curriculum will ensure that all children develop key language learning skills, as set out by the national curriculum, as well as a love of languages and learning about other cultures. The children will:

• understand and respond to spoken and written language from a variety of authentic sources

• speak with increasing confidence, fluency and spontaneity, finding ways of communicating what they want to say, including through discussion and asking questions, and continually improve the accuracy of their pronunciation and intonation

• write at varying length, for different purposes and audiences, using the variety of grammatical structures that they have learned

• discover and develop an appreciation of a range of writing in the language studied