The usual in an unusual way

This year in both my schools I have Year 3, Year 4 and Year 3/4 classes. For that reason I have had to devise a mixed age, two-year scheme of work. All three classes are working on the same curriculum (Cycle A of the scheme of work) this year. Because I have Year 4 children with one year of formal Spanish learning in the same class as Year 3 children who are beginners, I have had to seek a different context in which to introduce basic greetings, saying your name and first phonics, so that everyone can learn something new.

I chose the context of animals and the continents that they come from. This means that I can use soy instead of me llamo for saying their name (something new for the Year 4s) and then reuse soy in sentences such as Soy de Europa.

I chose the animal vocabulary and the first names so that they cover all the main phonemes/graphemes that we cover in Key Stage 2 Spanish, and also ensured that there was a good spread of names ending in -o, names ending in -a and names ending in neither for our first look at grammatical gender.

This video is designed to play at the beginning of a lesson while the children are getting ready, to introduce them to the animals and to begin to show them which continents the animals come from.

Do you adapt your scheme of work to cater for a range of student experience of language learning? Do you do the usual in an unusual way?