Meeting 1

Our first Spanish Ambassadors meeting was an introduction to why having a council to represent Spanish was important in our school life. 

Spanish has been selected as it is the mostly widely spoken international language after English, is the most likely to be used by our children at this stage in their life as most visit Spanish
speaking countries on holiday and allows for progression into higher education.

Using the full range of resources, including display materials, will increase the profile of languages across school. The learning environment will be consistent with key Spanish
vocabulary displayed, spoken and used by all learners.

Whole-school and parental engagement will improve through the use of language-specific home learning tasks and opportunities suggested in lessons and overviews for wider learning.

We want to ensure that Spanish is loved by teachers and pupils across school, therefore encouraging them
to embark on further language studies. 

Meeting 2

Most children at this point have had experienced speaking and listening to Spanish on their 'Wellbeing days'. Mr Rees is currently teaching Spanish to all pupils from year 1 to year 6 and children in reception has been singing along and learning Spanish songs.

However, as a council we feel we could do more as a school. We discussed a variety of ways to improve and support Spanish around the whole school - not in Spanish lessons. We spoke about having a Spanish display board - just like a Cymraeg board. Also, we could implement simple things such as using Spanish when doing the register - Hola!; have the option to do Spanish or Welsh Duolingo during our morning Group Guided reading sessions and creating a list of key vocabulary for teachers to use during their lessons.

Meeting 3

Mr Rees had visited another school (Stacey Primary School) to experience a school that has been implementing Spanish for a number of years. When we met, Mr Rees had explained that they are very successful at implementing whole school Spanish but that we need to put our own stamp on how we can promote it. 

We decided that everyone who takes part in Spanish Duolingo can be entered into an internal competition on the usage of Spanish Duolingo - providing the pupil with the most use a special prize (to be confirmed). Also, we recognised that we need more Spanish (bilingual) books across every class. We also discussed about celebrating speaking Spanish. We already have implemented 'Frase de la semona' (Phrase of the week) at provided certificates every fortnight, but we also wanted to celebrate culture. In our next meeting, we will look at ways to implement celebrating culture for Spanish and maybe other languages too.

Meeting 4

It was time to get an understanding of how the children were getting on with their Spanish lessons and how they feel about having Spanish lessons. The Spanish Ambassadors sat together to decide what would we like to know from our St Patricks children and devised a few questions to ask the pupils. We thought it was important to gather the information to help understand our pupils views and to help develop and improve their learning and experiences. With some guidance, the Spanish Ambassadors created ten key questions to help find out where our pupils are with their learning of Spanish and their feelings on it. We will report back with our results!

Meeting 5

Carrying on from our last meeting, it has been two weeks so that there was enough time for all pupils to take part in our Spanish questionnaires to help find out about their learning and feelings about speaking Spanish so far. All children have a 30 minute lesson of Spanish every two weeks during their wellbeing day so we needed time to allow pupils to complete the questionnaires. Most pupils would have had about 4-5 lessons of Spanish at this point and we wanted to see where pupils are at this early stage. The results shows that most pupils enjoyed their lessons and believe that speaking Spanish is important and that most pupils believe that having Spanish lessons helps them to speak more Spanish. Good results. However, as a team, we believe that there is room for improvement and in our next meeting, we will discuss ways forward to help improve Spanish speaking across the whole school.

Meeting 6

Going forward with how we can improve Spanish speaking across the whole, we wanted all staff to have access to some incidental Spanish which they can use within the classroom. Initially, we wanted to provide lots of support by providing various key word/phrases across the whole classroom, however, feedback from the teachers guided us to ensure that we don't overwhelm them with too much and therefore, gradually introduce key vocabulary through the rest of the year. We decided to provide opportunity for teacher to do the register in Spanish (if they wanted to) to help develop their Spanish speaking and become co-learners with the pupils of St Patricks.