At St Matthias, we teach French in KS2 as our foreign language.

Our aims are:

• to aspire to enrich children’s outlook, providing a link to other cultures and opportunities for pupils to express themselves in a different language and with a view to a broader understanding of the world.
• to believe they can develop the skills of listening, speaking, singing and writing in another language, opening pupils’ minds to the world beyond our own experiences.
• that children will develop their linguistic skills, acquiring the tools they need to achieve their goals in lessons and flourish in their MFL learning beyond St Matthias.

We will help them develop and demonstrate substantial progress in the 5 key language skills necessary for learning French: speaking, listening, reading, writing and grammar.

Our goal is for our learners to be passionate, curious and confident about their own foreign language learning abilities. We aim to ensure that pupils of all abilities develop solid foundations in the key language learning skills – so they are prepared for the next stage of their language-learning journey. These skills will develop children’s ability to understand what they hear and read and enable them to express themselves in speech and writing. We will extend their knowledge of how language works and explore the similarities and differences between the foreign language they are learning and English. We will also help strengthen their sense of identity through learning about culture in other countries and comparing it with their own.

Curriculum

        

Languages Day 2022

We held a special Languages Day on Thursday 7th July to celebrate different cultures and learn to speak a few words in different languages. We welcomed visitors in person and via zoom; Romanian, Spanish and Arabic speakers and we even had a Deaf guest with his interpreter to teach us British Sign Language! Children took part in a range of activities; from research tasks, songs, games, art, playing boules, board games and all children learned how to order croissants (and eat them) in our French cafe! During the day we tried speaking in Japanese, Mandarin, German, French, Spanish and Italian.

We welcomed visitors from The Chase High School during the afternoon; languages teacher Mrs Bennison taught some of our KS2 children a Spanish lesson and some of the Chase High School language students read stories to our children.

Our Deaf guest was: David Ellington, a film, theatre and TV actor and presenter. His interpreter was Pascale. They taught us signs for hello, goodbye, thank you, elephant, giraffe, lion/lioness, squirrel, yellow, white, black and tree.

This link https://www.ndcs.org.uk/information-and-support/language-and-communication/sign-language/family-sign-language/find-a-sign/  is the NDCS fingerspelling postcard if your children would like to challenge themselves to learning their fingerspell alphabet.  The NDCS also offer some fun online resources for free too!

Thank you to everyone who visited us, especially our parents who shared their home languages either in person or via zoom.

It was a magnifico day!