French
Mrs T Hill is the subject lead for MFL at Cottam.
Learning a foreign language at Cottam
At Cottam Primary School, children start learning a foreign language in Year 1 and continue learning it all the way through school.
Our aim is to inspire children and stimulate their curiosity in learning a foreign language and finding out about other cultures.
Aims
The National Curriculum for Languages aims to ensure that all pupils:
Understand and respond to spoken and written language from a variety of authentic sources.
Speak with increasing confidence, fluency and spontaneity, finding ways of communicating what they want to say, including through discussion and asking questions, and continually improving the accuracy of their pronunciation and intonation.
Can write at varying length, for different purposes.
Write for different audiences, using the variety of grammatical structures that they have learnt.
Discover and develop an appreciation of a range of writing in the language studied.
What is it like to learn a foreign language at Cottam Primary School?
At Cottam Primary School the foreign language we learn is French. Our French lessons take place within a classroom environment in which children are tolerant of each other and encourage each other to have a go. We design lessons which are fun and create happy, motivated French learners who have a positive attitude to learning languages.
European Day of Languages
We were delighted to take part in European Languages Day at Cottam. The European Day of Languages is held every year on 26th September.
This day was first celebrated in Europe in 2001 to recognise the range and diversity of languages spoken throughout Europe. We wanted to celebrate this day at Cottam because we believe that learning a language not only allows us to communicate with people from other countries but it also introduces us to different cultures and opens up a world of wonderful opportunities.
In order to mark the special day, the children dressed in colours to represent the French flag or the flag of their own country. Each class had been given a French song to learn and they impressed everyone when they sang these so beautifully in the special European Languages Day assembly. Each class then took part in a variety of activities based on European countries and languages during the day and also enjoyed eating pain au chocolat. We were very lucky because Mrs Bohane and Mrs Arsova came in to share their own languages and knowledge of other countries.
