Intent:

Our school vision ‘Curious Minds, Open Hearts & Joy of Learning’ is at the heart of all we do. At Homefield VC C of E Primary we strongly believe in providing children with inspiring, creative and meaningful learning experiences that builds on their natural curiosity and ignites their passion for learning. Children need a curriculum that is research based and supports the pedagogy of how children learn. Our CUSP French curriculum has been purposefully built around the principles of evidence-led practice. This is to ensure that there is a focus on high-quality development of children as linguists.

Curious Minds - We want our pupils to be curious to learn the language from another country. We aim for children to leave Homefield with key linguistic skills to support them in the modern world.

Open Hearts- To be open to learning about other cultures and issues that impact on the wider global community. For this reason, CUSP French has a specific emphasis on teaching pupils about French customs, traditions and heritage, including those that are both similar or different to pupils’ own experiences of life in modern Britain.

Joy of learning- To be enthusiastic and motivated to learn another language. Building on their prior knowledge and drawing comparisons between French and the English language.

Implementation:

Each unit of study focuses on phonics, grammatical structures, reading, writing, oracy and vocabulary.    CUSP French has been designed to serve young linguists in the modern world. Key areas of focus have been deliberately selected to ensure that The curriculum focuses not just on vocabulary acquisition but also on the building blocks of learning a new language.   Clear structures and learning routines underpin CUSP French. This allows pupils (and teachers) to direct their cognitive attention to the core content in each block. 

There is limited emphasis on pupils’ writing of French and a greater focus on reading, oracy and laying strong linguistic foundations. This is because pupils need to hear, see and say whole, correctly spelt words frequently before they are asked to apply these to written tasks. As pupils become more confident with curriculum content, teachers may choose to use the flexible content weeks to further develop pupils’ written French.

Impact:

Teachers will use the CUSP assessment matrices to evaluate and record the children’s attainment and progress for each block of learning. The CUSP curriculum is progressive. Each block includes study of key MFL linguistic concepts and previously learnt language concepts to enable pupils to build on known themes and vocabulary.

Assessment of French is formative and based on the pupil outcomes from each lesson. The following is used to assess pupils’ knowledge and understanding of language and pronunciation: • Expectations for each sequence are made explicit• Your turn tasks offer opportunities for teachers to assess pupils’ learning in a lesson. • Remember tasks offer opportunities for teachers to assess pupils’ learning from previous lessons. • Flexible content weeks can be used to assess pupils’ learning at the end of a block