Kings Hill School Primary & Nursery

Intent

At Kings Hill School and Nursery, we believe that our high-quality bespoke French curriculum inspires learners to become inquisitive and resilient learners, wanting to know more about the French-speaking world, showing an interest in language learning and communicating with their peers. 

Our French curriculum intends to:

• Develop a growing knowledge of French vocabulary and structures.
• Inspire learners’ knowledge of French culture.
• Introduce learners to a new phonic system to develop good pronunciation.
• Develop oracy skills.
• Enhance listening skills and language learning behaviour.
• Create links between other subjects.
• Engender an appreciation that cultures are different but also have similarities.
• Teach skills that can be applied in other languages.
• Ensure that pupils are ready to learn a language at KS3 as confident resilient learners.
• Use language learning as an opportunity to explore SMSC, engender British Values and align our school values with curriculum content.

Implementation

• Weekly lessons delivered by a language specialist.
• A cycle of lessons which enables progress and development in the areas of phonics, grammar, vocabulary and culture.
• Regular opportunities to revisit and reuse previous vocabulary and structures to lead to better retention and retrieval.
• Low stake quizzing and assessment for learning opportunities to track pupil attainment.
• Reactive teaching which takes into account progress or the need to cover content again.
• Challenge provided for those pupils who are bilingual or able in the subject.
• Access to magazines and books to experience “real-life” realia and access to the outdoor area to learn outside the classroom.
• Planning special days such as French day and links with other events like Diversity week and writing week.
• Entering competitions and celebrating our successes.

Impact

Our French curriculum is enriching and of a high quality. It tracks the learner’s journey of French through their school experience to allow for progression and retention. If children are keeping up with the curriculum, they are deemed to be making good or better progress. In addition, we measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods.

• Assessment for Learning self-assessment grids.
• Deep dives to see a progression of skills through year groups.
• Marking of books to see progress in listening, reading, writing and reading.
• Pupil discussions about their learning.

Modern Languages News

• Monday 18 December 2023 French Christmas! In French, we have finished off the year with some French films. The children enjoyed watching Un Chat á Paris and Ernest et Célestine with subtitles and could pick out lots of French words from the audio.
• Tuesday 10 October 2023 muñecas quitapenas To mark World Mental Health day, Spanish club have been making muñecas quitapenas. These are worry dolls that come from Guatemala. Children tell their worries to their dolls and place them under their pillows at night. It is believed that the worries are taken away in the night. We talked about how sharing our worries with someone else can help us solve any anxieties.
• Friday 13 January 2023 Deux Petits Oiseaux Year 3 have been busy learning and rehearsing a French rhyme. They even found time to make deux petits oiseaux (two little birds) finger puppets. We focused on some key phrases that we had learnt in Terms 1 and 2 and also looked at the oi sound in phonics, which the children noticed was very different to /oi / in English.
• Tuesday 15 November 2022 French Penpals from Nantes There has been great excitement in Year 6 as we have had our first letters from our French penfriends from Savenay near Nantes. The children have been really interested in finding out what their hobbies and interests are, ranging from listening to K-pop to mountain biking and basketball. In class we are now going to write to them. We have also looked on their school website and seen that their school day is very long, their school lunches are 4 courses and they study languages for 10 hours every week!
• Monday 22 November 2021 Year 6 French Pen Pals We have been really excited to receive letters from our school in France, the Collège Jeanne d’Arc in Apt. It was a joy to see how thrilled the children were. They were surprised at how different their handwriting is and how even their note paper is different to ours. Our friends in France told us all about their appearances and what they liked doing. There were a lot of Ed Sheeran and Harry Potter fans. The children have decided that they would like to send advent calendars and Christmas cards and we are going to learn a little about where Apt is and the beautiful Provençal countryside they are surrounded by.
• Friday 12 November 2021 French Update The children have been busy learning about Remembrance in France. We have learnt that
• Wednesday 22 September 2021 European Day of Languages In Language lessons this week we have been celebrating European Day of Languages, which is a celebration of all the different languages spoken across Europe and the cultures that go with those languages.
• Thursday 16 May 2019 French Day Every year we hold a French day in the Summer Term. Over the years we have started the day with warm croissantsand pains au chocolat. The whole school get involved with art projects, French playground games and learning French from our Year 6 Language Ambassadors.