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My work teaching Spanish as a Primary Higher Level Teaching Assistant There are many key partners who contribute significantly to the teaching of languages in the primary phase. Not all of them are teachers! Here, Josefina Alcolea Clover, a Higher Level Teaching Assistant from Henry Fawcett Primary in London describes her work in the school teaching Spanish:
I started teaching Y3 and am now teaching Y3 and Y4. The children enjoy learning Spanish and it has boosted the self-esteem in particular for some Spanish, Portuguese and French children who are not achieving well in other areas. They say: "I like it because she was playing the puppet and the music was on."
There are Spanish display boards in every Y3 and Y4 class and along the corridor, and Spanish greetings are heard every day around the school, both amongst teachers and children. |
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I am an HLTA working as a Teaching Assistant in Henry Fawcett Primary, in the London Borough of Lambeth. As a Spanish native I have worked closely with EMAG teachers and school management both as an interpreter and a support to Spanish speaking parents and children. With the news of the Government initiative for MFL our head teacher decided to maximize the school’s human resources and encouraged my enrolment in the DfES National Language Teaching Training for TAs two years ago. Since then I have delivered Spanish in our school. 
It has taken time for the teachers to understand the value of language teaching. Some scepticism as to the wisdom of it "when children could not even speak English properly”, fear of an added responsibility and a general wariness to languages (“I’m just not good at that”). The last two years have changed all that. Even today a Y3 teacher told me: “Don’t worry, we did not miss out on Spanish even though you were absent. Nina helped us to review the members of the family. She was so confident in correcting us! The children were amazed to learn that in her previous school she was taught EVERY subject in Spanish.” (Nina is Colombian, very shy usually). Other teachers asked me to prepare an assembly on Madrid (Cities of the World) or come to be interviewed by Year 6 doing a project on “Children in other cultures”. Other events have included “Sharing Assembly: Spanish Carnival Masks and Playing Cards” and Spanish Carols at Christmas. 
We have followed the QCA Scheme of Work linked to the KS2 Framework with some variations, often at the request of the class teacher, to reinforce areas of the curriculum that the children were learning at the time, for example: fruit, the time in analogue clock, continents and countries in the world, directions, times tables, and so forth… I teach Spanish twice a week to each class, in half hour sessions and always use plenty of visual, aural and hands on activities: flash-cards, puppets, music, PowerPoint, songs, games, physical movement, DVDs and other ICT resources. The interactive whiteboard and some of Spain’s educational sites have been an invaluable resource.