MFL

At Easington Church of England Primary Academy our curriculum is designed to: inspire enthusiasm for learning, build on achievement and support pupil well-being and happiness to allow our learners a safe environment within which to flourish.

As a Church of England school, Christian values underpin all that we do. We provide a rich and stimulating learning environment based on our four core Christian values of :

Thankfulness, Respect, Compassion and Friendship

We recognise that we are educating children for an unrecognisable future and in order to be prepared for this we identified the following golden threads which are woven throughout our broad and balanced Curriculum:

Our Golden Threads through our curriculum

Foster curiosity.

Learn to disagree respectfully.

Be open to another way.

Find your wonderful – ambition and self worth

Within our inclusive environment our curriculum allows all children to ensure that Equity, Curiosity and Ambition are nurtured.

“A community working in harmony to achieve our God – given potential.”

…It is inspired by John 10:10:

“I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”

Curriculum intent

We teach our children French using the Rachel Hawkes mixed aged scheme to generate a fascination for words and how language works, a wider curiosity about the peoples and cultures of French-speaking countries and the foundational knowledge to support confident communication in French.

Essential Knowledge

We teach three core strands of essential knowledge:  

1. Phonics – the key components of the sound-writing relationship
2. Vocabulary – a set of the most frequently used words
3. Grammar – the essential building blocks required to create simple sentences independently (including gender of nouns, singular and plural forms, adjectives (place and agreement), and the conjugation of key verbs)

Our French curriculum is designed to enable our children to:

• Develop linguistic and communicative competence
• Extend their knowledge of how language works
• Explore similarities and differences between French, other languages and English

The teaching of a foreign language to every child in KS2 is a statutory requirement, as set out in the National Curriculum Programmes of Study (2014).

In line with the NC PoS, our children learn to:

• Listen and show understanding by joining in and responding
• Link the sound, spelling and meaning of words
• Read aloud with accurate pronunciation 
• Read and show understanding of phrases and simple texts
• Speak in sentences
• Describe people, places, things in speech and writing
• Ask and answer questions
• Express opinions
• Write phrases from memory
• Adapt phrases to create new sentences
• Use a dictionary 

Our progression document is here

Our children also learn key cultural and country-specific knowledge. For example; names and locations of French speaking countries, festivals, traditions and typical foods.

Curriculum provision

Our KS2 children have a weekly French lesson of around 45 minutes.  This is taught as a Year 3/4 group and Year 5/6 group in order to support progression and effective use of the scheme.  We use the supporting work booklets in order to structure the development of listening, reading and writing through phonics, vocabulary and grammar tasks.  Speaking is practised in a variety of ways including games, paired work and Seesaw.

We aim to make lessons fun and engaging in order to spark a passion for language learning which will support them in the future.

Our long term plan allows pupils to revisit learning as well as develop new phonics, vocabulary and grammar. This is our long term overview.

Assessment

Children are continuously assessed informally on the knowledge they are taught in lessons through a range of structured tasks and games. The scheme also offers end of unit assessments that cover phonics, vocabulary and grammar through the modalities of listening, speaking, reading and writing. We use these appropriately to support our children’s needs and next steps.