St Helen's Primary School

St. Helen's Primary School

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French

Our School Vision: 

To create a school that enables all pupils (no matter what background or starting point) to achieve their full potential and promotes the school as a beacon within the community, where aspirations are achieved and dreams are a reality for all pupils, staff and families

Our French Vision:
To develop a range of vocabulary, a knowledge of French phonemes and an understanding of basic grammar in order to be able to communicate practically, and with enjoyment in French by reading, writing, listening and speaking.

Our French Curriculum

 “Learning a foreign language is a liberation from insularity and provides an opening to other cultures. A high-quality languages education should foster pupils’ curiosity and deepen their understanding of the world.”   NC MFL

These are the first lines of the purpose of study for Modern Foreign Languages in the National Curriculum. This is particularly important in our school as most of our pupils live in a  culturally non-diverse community. It is important for our pupils to see and hear “difference” and be excited and engaged with it. We see language learning as a vital skill in our globalised world and seek to equip our pupils to engage with it. An open and outward looking attitude enables communication and demonstrates our core British values of acceptance, respect and tolerance.

  

Phonics

To be able to read, write and speak, we need to recognise and understand the phonemes and graphemes of the language. We learn to read and write in English using our Little Wandle phonics scheme in Early Years and Year 1. When we learn another language, such as French, it is equally as important to learn the new phonemes and graphemes of that language. For example, in French the grapheme  “eu” makes a sound (phoneme) similar to the sound that in English we represent with the grapheme “er”.  The grapheme “ch” makes the sound “sh”.

Our pupils have fun in their French lessons learning this new phoneme/grapheme correspondence.

Vocabulary 

Pupils learn a range of common vocabulary in order to be able to communicate effectively about a range of everyday topics. For example, to be able to describe people, places and things, and to be able to ask and answer simple questions. Vocabulary, such as key verbs, colours and numbers, are revisited throughout KS2 in different contexts in order to secure it in the long-term memory.  Children will also broaden their vocabulary by using a bi-lingual dictionary.

Grammar

 Pupils are taught to understand basic grammatical structures including feminine and masculine forms (la  and le,  une and un) and the conjugation of high-frequency verbs. They learn key features and patterns of the language and how to apply these. For instance, they learn that the position of the adjective in French is usually different to that of English (after the noun) and different ways to structure questions. They learn that some words that are capitalised in English are not capitalised in French such as the personal pronoun I (je) and days and months.

Statement for SEND

 Our French curriculum promotes and develops cultures, policies and practices that include all learners. We aim to engender a sense of community and belonging and believe that educational inclusion is about equal opportunities for all learners, whatever their age, gender, ethnicity, impairment, attainment and background. We promote a curriculum that puts all pupils, regardless of their needs, at the heart of what we do. By building mutual respect, we accept others for their differences believing that everyone is special and everyone has something to offer. Our inclusive and enriching curriculum, written for all children, provides pupils with meaningful and aspirational experiences as well as promoting personal growth for life-long learning. When the curriculum needs adapting, to suit the needs of individual children, appropriate modifications are made by the class teacher with support of the SENDCo and the Curriculum Subject Lead.

Useful Links for Parents

 BBC Bitesize

Duo Lingo

Long Term Mapping

 French Long Term Plan

Unit Summaries and Medium Term Mapping

 French Medium Term Plan

 

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