Modern Foreign Languages

Learning a language brings us closer together, bridges gaps and helps bring the world together as one!

Modern Foreign Languages inspires children with a natural curiosity in the world around them, a realisation that we are a small part of a big global community and most significantly an opportunity to become literate in another language; ultimately widening their horizons. At Norton, we learn French from Year 2 onwards, and the curriculum is designed so that the children learn to hear, speak, read and write French, building upon knowledge to secure greater understanding. We start young to help capture that early enthusiasm towards language learning, we want our year 2’s to start year 3 with a firm love of languages already developed!

Children show resilience when learning foreign language songs, stories and grammar, which not only strengthens their knowledge of French, but the knowledge of grammar in all languages. This will aid children in their pursuit of acquiring other languages later in their learning journeys and creates forward-thinking learners within their own native, language acquisition. We celebrate cultural differences, and seize upon opportunities to engage in the languages of our students or staff, who may speak other languages at home. Through looking for similarities, be it similar sounds or similar spellings across different languages; we can make links between the languages and see how we are one community, which has, through time, moved and settled across the globe sharing culture and language as we travel. 

Our language curriculum uses opportunities to show how we are all the same, as well as celebrating the differences in culture. This promotes a lifelong respect of others.  To find out more, please see our vision for Languages and the subject progression documents also attached.

In Angelica today, the children used their knowledge of French sentence construction and prior knowledge of French connectives to write postcards from Paris. We have been learning to write in the past and future tenses. Très bien les garçons! -   May 2022

Angelica Class Cafe Role Play

Hollyhock class writing examples (Year 3/4)