Curriculum Map - SpanishYear 7
In Year 7 Spanish, students learn how to introduce themselves, talk about their age, physical and personal attributes. They also learn how to talk about their friends and family, school, food and free time activities. Students learn through activities in both productive and receptive skills; reading and listening, speaking and writing. They can use a wide range of vocabulary and grammar related to the aforementioned topics, allowing them to communicate effectively in the target language and understand authentic spoken and written texts. In their first year of Spanish at Wren Academy Enfield, students learn how to form and use the present and near future tenses so that they can manipulate language and make new meaningful sentences. All students engage with a wide variety of cultural elements within their lessons and home learning by studying Hispanic festivals, Art, History and Music.
Why?
The students learn about topics relevant to their lives so that they can begin to communicate with one another in the target language and gain confidence as they form the foundations of their language learning journey. Exposure to the target culture serves to motivate students and show them other ways of life to encourage intercultural understanding. Students are exposed to a wide variety of cultural information so that they can understand the cultural differences and similarities between Spain and Latin America to nurture open-mindedness.
Year 8
In Year 8, students build on their existing knowledge of the language and learn about holidays, music and television, food, clothes, daily routine and home and local area. They can use the past, present, near future and conditional tenses, along with the imperative and passive voice. Students are able to understand and discern the difference between the three different timeframes and can use comparatives and superlatives to talk about their region. There is a greater focus on productive skills in Year 8, meaning that students get plenty of practice with speaking and written tasks, using a range of vocabulary and grammatical structures to manipulate sentences and produce new meaning.
Why?
The curriculum is built to ensure students can understand texts and audio and express themselves, in all three timeframes (past, present, future) by the end of Year 8, meaning they are able to access texts and audio on a range of topics relevant to their lives. The grammatical, cultural and linguistic skills serve to deepen students’ understanding of Hispanic history and culture. Retrieval of previously learned vocabulary is embedded regularly to ensure students recall vocabulary and build on previous knowledge.
Year 9
In Year 9, students’ linguistic and cultural world is opened up further, studying vocabulary on the wider world, jobs and future aspirations, health and rights. Students learn how to talk about Fair Trade, recycling and their local area, with a cultural topic centred around Spain’s capital, Madrid. They learn how to use modal verbs, four tenses and begin using more complex structures with subclauses. The vocabulary and topics from Year 7 and Year 8 are revisited regularly to ensure knowledge is retained and built into long term memory. Students are exposed to more complex texts which build resilience to unfamiliar contexts.
Why?
By the end of Year 9, students have been exposed to an array of topics which provide them with the ability to express themselves on a wide range of themes in three timeframes. They are able to lift and use vocabulary from different contexts studied over the years to both produce and understand texts on different subject areas.
The Key Stage 3 (KS3) course enables students to gain an understanding of Spanish and Latin American culture, as well as be able to understand and manipulate key language using their grammatical and linguistic knowledge which have been consolidated over the three year KS3 course.