St John's Primary School

French at St John’s

 The importance of French at St John's.

Learning a foreign language is important as it gives children a good understanding of the structure of other languages and it gives children the opportunity to develop their cultural understanding and deepen their knowledge of the wider world.  It also supports the children’s transition into local high schools where they teach French alongside other languages.

INTENT

1. Self – Learning a language provides our pupils with the confidence and skills needed to
communicate more effectively as they progress in to the next stage of their learning.
2. Others – We hope to provide our pupils with a wider international perspective of other cultures
and languages, developing respect and tolerance.
3. Wider world – We aim to enthuse and inspire our pupils to understand the benefits of language learning and the greater opportunities which ensue in our modern world.

 IMPLEMENTATION

The National Curriculum for Languages aims to ensure that all KS2 pupils:

• 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 improving the accuracy of their pronunciation and intonation
• can write at varying length, for different purposes and audiences, using the variety of grammatical structures that they have learnt
• discover and develop an appreciation of a range of writing in the language studied.

We follow the Kapow scheme for French which develops children in the four key skills of:

• Speaking
• Listening
• Reading
• Writing

Whilst developing these key skills the children are encouraged to record their work through pictures, videos, captions and sentences. They take part in practical activities, songs and games to help improve memory and recall. Although our French programmes is structured in KS2, younger children participate in French songs.

Please see links below for our long term plan for French and the progression of knowledge and skills document: 

A St John's Linguist...

Children have the opportunity to develop their writing skills as well as their speaking skills with role play.