From Year 3 onwards, Spanish lessons are taught weekly and each term has a different topic such as In the City, Describing Family, Café Culture and Restaurants. Through these topics, a wealth of vocabulary is covered and children are regularly given the opportunity to speak, listen to and read Spanish. Our scheme is structured in a way that children in Upper Key Stage 2, build on their prior learning from Lower Key Stage 2. For example, where children in Years 3 and 4 may say a few words that could be understood by a native speaker, children Years 5 and 6 will be able to ask and answer questions using full sentences. Children in Years 3 and 4 may be able to give basic information about themselves (name, age etc) whereas children in Years 5 and 6 can talk about themselves and give opinions on why they like or dislike something.

Units of work start with a focus on vocabulary for example in the En La Ciudad unit for year 5, Spanish words for places are learnt first (el cine, el mercado, la galleria etc) and later in the unit, this is built upon as more complex phrases are practised as children role play buying a ticket (una entrada) for each place. In the 'Animals' unit in Year 3, children start by learning some vocabulary for animals and then talk about which ones they like (me gusta) and which ones they don’t like (no me gusta). Grammatical features, such as the conjugation of verbs in the ‘you’ (tu) form and the ‘I’ form (yo) are practised as well as accompanying prepositions such as ‘al and a la’ (to the). This way, an idea of how the endings of verbs change depending on the subject is embedded before children embark on language learning in secondary school.

Pronunciation is practised through repetition of the target language. If the teacher is a Spanish speaker then this can be successfully modelled by them, however, if the teacher is not secure with this, the Primary Languages Network scheme that we use features recordings of the words and phrases for the lesson, spoken by native Spanish speakers.