The curriculum content may appear daunting, but do not panic! You don’t have to be able to speak Spanish to support your child with their learning at home. Simply talking to your child about what they have been learning in their language lessons that week and asking them to teach you some key words or phrases is a fantastic way of helping children recall previous learning. Perhaps they have a younger sibling or other family members that they might want to teach some key words, for example numbers, to as well?

Search YouTube for songs, clips or short TV shows in Spanish with your son or daughter. They could search for a song that they have been learning in school or the Spanish version of their favourite cartoon. If you want to have a go at some mindfulness activities with your child, try searching for ‘Es Irene’ on YouTube. Whilst children may not be able to understand everything that they are hearing, by simply listening to the lyrics of song or the words of a TV show, their ears are becoming attuned to the sounds and rhythms of Spanish and they may be able to eventually pick out familiar words or phrases.

Hunt for bilingual books at the library. Many libraries have a bilingual book section where children might find simple stories in Spanish. They can have a go at reading the Spanish parts whilst you provide the translation in English.

Keep your eyes open when out and about in town or the supermarket. Challenge your children to find Spanish or South American products on the supermarket shelves and see if they can read the packaging or work out exactly where the item is from. Do they recognise any ingredient names in Spanish? Perhaps they could make their own list of things to buy in Spanish? When you are walking around town, children might also try and spot words in English that have been similar to Spanish (café, restaurante etc.)

Encourage older children to create a resource for younger pupils in the school to use. This could take the form of a ‘Knowledge Organiser’ (which presents all the vocabulary for a particular unit of work), a game or a poster with key words on it.

Websites to support learning Spanish in school