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Friday, 21 February 2020

Curriculum map and overhaul #2



Shortly before Christmas, I blogged about my review of my scheme of work for KS2 Spanish.  On my to-do list for this half term was to give some shape to the thoughts I had about it before Christmas and also what has occurred to me while teaching the current scheme this term.

Above you can see the new outline that I have been working out.  Some thoughts:

  • I'm now really pleased with Year 3, particularly with how the high-frequency verbs are interwoven and revisited.
  • I'm less happy that ser (to be) and tener (to have) to not feature in Year 4.  Can anyone think of a way that they might be incorporated?
  • The Y6 topic Then and Now, to be honest, is very much a repetition of the preceding unit, En mi pueblo.  The only new language is adjectives describing a town and the two imperfect forms era and había.  I'm considering scrapping Then and Now, putting the adjectives into the previous unit and making Unit 18 all about clothes, which could then work on regular -AR verbs and incorporate a lot of previous language from Years 3-5.  What do you think?
  • Delaying adjectival agreement until Year 5 might make it easier for the children!
All feedback is very welcome.  Time is of the essence for me now, as I have almost finished Unit 4 with my Year 3s and have already started new Unit 5 with my beginner Year 4s.

3 comments:

  1. I'm sure I wrote a comment when you first posted this but it seems to have disappeared into the ether!
    Y3 looks great like that - food is a great topic to start with but it makes far more sense to move it to Y4 and have family after gender of nouns. Also good to have 3rd person introduced. Lots of practise of key Q&A and verbs.
    I completely agree with moving adjectival agreements to Y5 - much mroe chance to 'get it' by then as the idea of gender and number is far more embedded by then, plus kids will have seen examples and possibly already asked questions about why azul is azules and rojo is roja by then.
    As to Then and Now, I never get that far anyway and just add the adjectives bit from it to En mi pueblo.In fact, I'm looking forward to actually getting to teach Planets for once, and I like the idea of a new unit on clothes. A great way to end Y6 with the possibility of fashion shows!
    As to ser and tener in Y4:
    TENER - Could you use it with some maths word problems with numbers and/or fruit.
    eg Tengo diez manzanas. Doy cinco a Gloria. ¿Cuántas tengo ahora?
    Miriam tiene un gato. Su hermano Félix tiene un hámster y su hermana Geni tiene un gato también. ¿Cuántos animales tiene la familia?
    SER - use with fruit and veg - ¿De qué color es/son....? as a reprise of unit 3/6 - also fits as opinions can be given about colours too.

    Lisa x

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    1. ¡Gracias Lisa! And thank you for the ser/tener ideas. Since I wrote this I've purchased the Routledge Frequency Dictionary of Spanish (proper nerd reading!) and am using it to guide the choice of vocabulary - the more high-frequency the better! For example I always played ¿Más o menos? with the children to practise the numbers 1-15, and it turns out it's an activity I need to keep as más is more frequent than all the numbers except 1! Similarly the 2 words in buenos días are much more frequent than hola. I've also noticed in the list of verbs that the most frequent AR verb is hablar, which is making me think I might switch that last Y6 unit to hablar + languages. Watch this space!

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  2. Hi Clare! I really like your new scheme order, thank you for sharing it, it is going to help me in my task of redoing mine! I agree with adjectival agreement in Year 5, I have been teaching it in year 4 and i think they are not ready. Also, changing it to Year 5 helps them remember better for secondary and then revisiting with clothes in Year 6 is perfect! Clothes in Y6 will be a good opportunity to revise prices and shopping, what you wear in each season? If you teach hablar in Y6 you could have a nice unit on countries that border Spain, compass points, languages, nationalities. Concerning tener, I don't know your scheme very well, do you teach the expressions with tener? Im sure you already do, if not you could teach tengo que and tengo fr'io, tengo hambre, tengo miedo etc (although these tie in very nicely with subordinating (cuando tengo fr'io, me pongo un abrigo, cuando tengo hambre, como un bocadillo etc). This is so good that we can bounce ideas! I now want to show you my idea of the order of my scheme but it is such a mess.... I need to work a lot on it!

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