At Hampstead Parochial we are lucky to be taught Spanish, a worldwide language, by a native Spanish speaker. With nearly 493 million native speakers, it is the world’s second largest mother tongue.
The curriculum is designed to align with the other subjects that the children learn, to enable them to make cross-curricular links, and develop language skills which are relevant and applicable. We learn about Spanish culture way of life, and celebrate Spanish festivals.
The progression of skills is planned with particular language components in mind: phonics, vocabulary and grammar. For phonics, we learn the phoneme for each grapheme, and compare them to English phonemes and graphemes. We learn the easiest and most prevalent sounds first, and the phonemes that are relevant for the curriculum, e.g. the children learn ‘j’ (strong /h/ sound) when learning colours in Reception, for the colour ‘rojo’.
Vocabulary links are made to phonic sounds and appropriate to the topic, and align with the learning that children will be doing in other areas of their schooling.
Grammar progresses through the conjugation of the verb to express different people and times, starting from first person present in Reception.