Grange Primary School's Vision
Grow, persevere, succeed. Be the best you can be!

Our French Vision

At Grange Primary School, we use the Primary Languages Network scheme of work to teach French which covers all aspects of the National Curriculum.

Grange Primary School's 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.

The Primary Languages scheme provides interactive resources to make the learning of a language exciting for pupils. Within the scheme, there is  support for pupils to develop their skills across different stages in listening, speaking, reading and writing. 

                     

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.

SEND Statement

Grange Primary promotes 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 from the SENDCo and the Curriculum Subject Lead.

Contact Information

If you would like further information regarding our French curriculum at Grange, please contact Mrs Musgrave through the school office.