MFL Newsletter
At Our Lady’s Primary School, we are proud to offer French as part of your child's programme of study. Learning by listening to, reading,...
The intention of the French curriculum at Our Lady’s is that children are taught to develop an interest in learning other languages in a way that is enjoyable and stimulating. In our school, we teach a foreign language to all children in year 3 -6 as part of the normal school curriculum. We do this for several reasons. Firstly, we believe that many children really enjoy learning to speak another language. Secondly, we also believe that the earlier a child is exposed to a foreign language, the faster the language in question is acquired. We also believe that it is a good idea to introduce a new language to children when they are at primary school, as they tend to be less self-conscious about speaking aloud at this stage of their development. It is widely believed that the early acquisition of a foreign language facilitates the learning of other foreign languages later in life. Our MFL curriculum is designed to progressively develop children skills in languages, through regular taught lessons. Children progressively acquire, use and apply a growing bank of vocabulary organised around topics.
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'I really like my French lessons. We play word games and sing songs to help us to learn the language.'
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'We learned a song about the days of the week and it was fun.'
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'I like that time to speak in French with each other pupils. '
On Friday 25th September, Our Lady’s celebrated European Day of Languages. The European Day of Languages is celebrated every year on 26th September. Now that it will be in its seventeenth year, we thought that we would celebrate this day in style.
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The aims of the European Day of Languages include:
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To celebrate the diversity of languages and cultures within Europe.
To encourage language learning at any age.
To promote intercultural understanding.
To diversify the range of languages learnt.
On this day, the children learned new knowledge and skills in a variety of languages, tasting different national food and much more. If you can speak a foreign language, can cook a national dish, can dance a national dance, create some national art etc or would like to help out on future days, Our Lady’s would love for you to get involved. Further details will follow for next year's event
The staff and children thoroughly enjoyed the day!
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Include:
The importance of parents in supporting and encouraging language learning at every stage
The different sorts of language homework
The different requirements over different years of KS2
In the initial stages of language learning, the most useful follow up learning for pupils is to re-visit the learning from the lesson with an adult or older sibling. Simply being asked to recall the new language and even ‘teach it’ to a parent or brother / sister provides an ideal opportunity for the new language to take root in longer term memory. To this end, the school values the vital contribution of parents to the language learning process. Key words for each unit of work are available on the MFL curriculum section of our website. Parents are encouraged to engage their children in sharing their new words with them. In upper KS2, when literacy skills are more fully developed, homework will take a variety of forms, and parents are encouraged to ask their children to show them their homework each week and explain what they are learning.
At Our Lady’s Primary School, in line with our curriculum intent, we have developed a foundation subject tracking system. It will capture our ongoing assessments of each child showing us how well our curriculum is being implemented as well as how our children are progressing through the curriculum and the impact it has on their learning. It will enable teachers to plan subsequent learning opportunities so that individual needs are met and children can make progress towards the end of year expectations. Judgements relating to end of year expectations will be made at the end of the academic year.
There are a number of documents that provide further information on this subject or are relevant to particular year groups. Click on the relevant title to open the document.