Subjects: Modern Foreign Language

Latin

As children move into Key stage 2, they are introduced to Latin following the Minimus scheme of work, implemented by Classics for All at Oxford University. Our intent for the teaching of Latin is to teach children in a rich, balanced and progressive curriculum, using Latin to support vocabulary development, a deeper understanding of grammatical structures and etymology in English and foreign languages and for children to investigate the derivatives of language alongside historical stories.

The teaching of Latin follows a clear progression in line with age-related expectations.

Why Latin?

Enhancing children’s vocabulary and promoting a love of reading and language is at the heart of everything we do. Latin is a natural fit for our vision of building better ‘sticky’ knowledge for long term learning in a range of subjects. We teach concepts like ‘democracy’ and ‘monarchy’ in history, but we need to do even more to help our pupils make meaningful, rich connections between those words. When pupils are making connections between the root or roots of a word, they are creating a larger picture of meaning (a schemata). In doing this, they are making links to the long-term memory. In this way they will know more, remember more.

At Queen Emma’s Primary School we believe that we should be capitalising more in our pupils’ interest in and playfulness with big words. We believe that we should be talking to them more about where words they came from and the roots of the words, which are usually from Latin and Greek. In every subject at Queen Emma’s Primary School there are concepts and key vocabulary which pupils need to grasp and to use with confidence.

Since Latin lies at the root of 60% of English words, studying it has a beneficial impact on development of English vocabulary across a range of subjects – such as science, geography and history – and language skills in general.