KS2 ReadMe

Curriculum design
The overall curriculum plans for KS2 French, German and Spanish have the following design:

• Time allocation (realistic yet optimal)
• a 30-minute lesson
• five mini follow ups (4 of 5 minutes, 1 of 10 minutes)
• 60 minutes per week in total
• The three strands
• phonics and grammar repeat in Y3 & 4 and then again in Y5 & 6
• vocabulary varies (so that lessons themselves are different)
• Structure (4-year consecutive or 2-year rolling)
• o the repetition of phonics and grammar content together with the variation in vocabulary makes it possible for the years Red and Yellow to be completed in either order, and the same for Blue and Green schemes. Schools with mixed age classes in lower and/or upper KS2 can follow the scheme as a 2-year rolling programme. Other schools can teach the four years sequentially.

Support for teachers

These SOW have been meticulously planned. Teachers without specialist language knowledge tell us that they are learning a lot of language themselves by using them. Most importantly, the fully audio’ d versions of the resources give teachers confidence to include all of the listening and speaking activities. In this way, the SOW and resources level the quality of learning experience for all learners.

The logical sequencing of new knowledge, the spaced revisiting schedule, the explicit presentation and practice of phonics, together with the rich cultural input, frequent opportunities for spoken interaction and written production and familiar narrative thread add up to a curriculum that not only stimulates pupils’ curiosity, but really enable pupils to begin to express their ideas and thoughts in the new language and to understand its speakers, both in speech and writing.

Note that CPD is available to support teachers as they begin to use the scheme. Find out more, here.

The National Curriculum

In line with the National Programme of Study for Languages at KS2, our curriculum enables pupils 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

Through this curriculum, we foster in our pupils a fascination for words and how language works, a wider curiosity about the peoples and cultures of countries where the new language is spoken and the foundational knowledge to support confident communication.

Our 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 the new language and any heritage languages our children have, and English.

Transition and the new GCSE

The key to moving closer towards the aspiration of 90% students completing at least one GCSE in MFL is curriculum continuity and cohesion. Now that the new GCSE curriculum has been much more clearly defined, we can give all our learners the maximum time to develop the knowledge they need to be confident communicators in the new language. This involves some careful content selection at KS2, particularly because learning time is so limited (a modest 60 minutes per week is still aspirational for most schools). The grammar and phonics content of these SOW overlap 100% with the new GCSE subject content. The vocabulary overlap is between 90 – 96% (depending on language and awarding organisation). Precise detail on individual words is provided in each SOW. This means that almost all the words taught at KS2 will also be needed for and revisited with a purpose at KS3 and KS4.

The licence

These lesson resources are licensed as CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

This means that you can:

• Share and use the material
• Edit and build from the material

As long as you:

1. "BY" Attribute, say who the work is "by". A proper attribution for an edited resource could look like this: "This resource is based on Y3_4_rouge_t1_w1_lesson (by Guillou, Marie-Odile; Hawkes, Rachel), licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0." Note that it links to: (A) the resource (B) the owner and (C) the license.
2. "NC" Are using it for non-commercial activity, ie do not earn any money from your use of the materials. For example, these resources can be used at free talks with our license, but not in paid talks.
3. "SA" Assign the same license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 to anything you create, meaning the material is "shared alike"

Artwork is by Steve Clarke. All additional pictures selected are available under a Creative Commons license, no attribution required.

Note: The previous KS2 French and Spanish SOW and resources are still available. Access them via the Other Primary Resources tab.

Rachel Hawkes
September 2023