Structured Primary French & Spanish Curriculum from Year 2 to Year 6
Teach languages. Not planning. Not hunting for resources. Just teaching.
A complete Primary Languages Scheme of Work for French and Spanish, designed to reduce teacher workload and build confident language learners through structured progression from Year 2 to Year 6.
Give your pupils a clear language-learning journey that builds year after year.
Why many language lessons start to feel disconnected over time
Many primary teachers work incredibly hard creating engaging lessons.
But without a clear long-term structure, progression can easily become repetitive, fragmented
or difficult to sustain across KS2.
Too much isolated vocabulary
Pupils often learn topics separately without enough opportunities to recycle and build language over time.
Speaking confidence develops slowly
Pupils may recognise vocabulary but still struggle to communicate confidently.
Planning becomes overwhelming
Building progression from scratch every week creates unnecessary workload for teachers.
A structured curriculum helps pupils build language step by step — not topic by topic.
Trusted by UK primary schools
— Miss Williams, Headteacher, Bells Farm Primary
— Mr Hill, Headteacher, Water Mill Primary
— Mrs Hedges, Headteacher, St John’s C of E Primary
— Mrs Wale, Year 6 Teacher, St John’s C of E Primary
Give your pupils a clear language-learning journey that builds year after year.
A Complete Primary Languages Scheme of Work
Teach languages. Not planning. Not hunting for resources. Just teaching.
A complete Primary Languages curriculum for French and Spanish, designed to help schools deliver structured, progressive language learning from Year 2 to Year 6.
Gramacri brings together ready-to-teach lessons, phonics, vocabulary, grammar, listening, speaking, reading, writing, assessment and curriculum progression within one coherent programme, helping teachers reduce planning workload while pupils build secure linguistic knowledge year after year.
Give your pupils a clear language-learning journey that builds year after year.
Why Primary Language Learning Needs More Than Topics
Many primary language lessons are engaging in isolation. The difficulty comes when those individual lessons need to become a coherent curriculum.
Without clear sequencing, pupils can move from colours to animals, food to hobbies and school to holidays without sufficiently retrieving or applying what they learned before.
The result can be lots of vocabulary encountered, but limited cumulative language development.
Too much isolated vocabulary
Learning a new topic should not mean leaving previous language behind.
In the Gramacri curriculum, previously learned vocabulary returns in new contexts and is gradually combined with phonics, grammatical structures and increasingly demanding communication.
Speaking confidence develops slowly
Recognising individual words is not the same as being able to communicate.
Pupils progressively move from imitation and short modelled responses towards sentence construction, questions and answers, opinions, justification and increasingly independent spoken language.
Planning progression is demanding
Creating an individual French or Spanish lesson is one thing.
Planning how phonics, grammar, vocabulary, listening, speaking, reading and writing should develop across several years is considerably more complex.
Gramacri provides that long-term structure.
A structured Primary Languages curriculum helps pupils build language step by step — not simply topic by topic.
A Complete Primary Languages Scheme of Work
Gramacri provides separate French and Spanish Schemes of Work from Year 2 to Year 6, giving schools a coherent journey from pupils’ first structured experience of another language to increasingly independent language use at the end of primary school.
Each programme contains 30 progressive units, with six units in every year group.
The programme begins with an accessible, oral-first introduction in Year 2 before moving into a structured KS2 Languages curriculum from Year 3 onwards.
Across the programme, pupils progressively develop:
phonics and pronunciation;
vocabulary;
grammar;
listening;
speaking;
reading;
writing;
cultural, intercultural and global understanding.
But progression does not simply mean introducing harder topics.
Knowledge is deliberately revisited, retrieved, connected, transferred and recombined so that pupils increasingly learn how to use what they know.
That principle sits at the heart of both the French and Spanish Schemes of Work.
Primary MFL Progression: Encounter, Build, Develop, Extend, Apply
The Gramacri curriculum is organised around five progressive stages:
Year 2 — Encounter
First encounters and early combination
Pupils listen, imitate and recognise familiar language while building early sound–meaning associations.
They encounter high-frequency vocabulary and recurring language chunks and begin combining familiar words and structures into short phrases, simple sentences and rehearsed exchanges.
The emphasis is on confidence, curiosity, listening and participation.
Year 3 — Build
Building core linguistic foundations
Pupils retrieve and extend familiar vocabulary while developing greater awareness of how language works.
They begin developing explicit phonics knowledge, recognise recurring grammatical patterns, construct complete sentences and ask and answer familiar questions.
Simple opinions and reasons gradually become part of communication.
Year 4 — Develop
Applying linguistic systems
Pupils increasingly apply their knowledge rather than depending exclusively on models.
Phonics supports pronunciation and decoding.
Grammar becomes increasingly explicit as pupils develop greater control of concepts such as gender, number, articles, prepositions and adjectival agreement.
Known vocabulary and structures are combined into increasingly developed spoken and written language.
Year 5 — Extend
Combining, transferring and manipulating language
Previously learned language is increasingly transferred between contexts.
Pupils manipulate grammatical person, agreement, positive and negative structures, infinitives and increasingly systematic present-tense verb patterns.
They construct longer sentences, express and justify opinions and begin producing connected language with reduced scaffolding.
Year 6 — Apply
Strategic application and increasing independence
By Year 6, pupils increasingly select the vocabulary, phonics and grammatical knowledge they need rather than relying on language presented immediately before a task.
They retrieve learning from different units and year groups, recombine familiar language, work with increasingly connected texts and communicate for more purposeful spoken and written outcomes.
The objective is not fluency by the end of primary school.
It is to establish strong, transferable linguistic foundations for continued language learning at secondary school.
Encounter → Build → Develop → Extend → Apply
Imitate and recognise → Build patterns → Apply systems → Manipulate and transfer → Select and communicate increasingly independently
This five-stage progression is the core architecture of both Gramacri Schemes of Work.
French Scheme of Work for Primary Schools
The Gramacri Primary French Scheme of Work provides a sequenced French curriculum from Year 2 to Year 6.
Rather than treating individual topics as isolated blocks, each new stage draws on knowledge established previously.
Pupils progress through carefully selected contexts including personal information, family, colours and numbers, animals, food, phonics, clothes, daily routines, school, physical description, sport, environment, biodiversity, global issues, weather, travel, holidays and places.
These contexts provide opportunities to introduce new language while retrieving and applying previous vocabulary and structures.
French phonics develops progressively from listening and sound memory towards explicit sound–spelling knowledge, pronunciation and decoding.
Grammar develops from recurring chunks and simple patterns towards greater control of gender, articles, possessives, agreement, negatives, connectives, grammatical person and familiar verb systems.
By Year 6, pupils increasingly draw upon accumulated French to understand and create connected language.
The French curriculum explicitly comprises 30 progressive units, with structured progression through vocabulary, phonics and grammar rather than treating a unit as “finished” once a topic ends.
Spanish Scheme of Work for Primary Schools
The Gramacri Primary Spanish Scheme of Work follows the same progressive curriculum architecture from Year 2 to Year 6 while developing the phonological, lexical and grammatical knowledge required specifically for Spanish.
Pupils encounter Spanish through engaging and meaningful contexts before progressively retrieving and applying previously learned language.
Across the programme they develop knowledge through topics including personal information, family, colours and numbers, animals, food, Spanish phonics, clothes, daily routines, school, physical description, sport, environmental themes, biodiversity, global issues, weather, travel, holidays and places.
Spanish phonics develops progressively from sound awareness and imitation towards explicit sound–spelling correspondence, pronunciation and decoding.
Grammar develops through meaningful language use before pupils progressively gain greater control over linguistic patterns and familiar verb systems.
By the end of Year 6, pupils increasingly select and recombine accumulated Spanish for extended and purposeful communication.
How Our Primary Languages Scheme of Work Builds Progression
A genuinely progressive MFL curriculum should show more than which topic pupils study in each year.
It should demonstrate how their linguistic knowledge and ability change over time.
Gramacri therefore tracks progression across eight interconnected curriculum threads.
Phonics and Pronunciation Progression
Language begins with sound.
In Year 2, pupils listen carefully, imitate pronunciation and build sound memory.
They subsequently develop selected sound–spelling correspondences before learning to apply phonics more systematically to pronunciation, reading aloud and decoding.
As pupils progress, phonics becomes increasingly transferable.
Rather than reproducing only immediately modelled words, pupils learn to draw on accumulated phonics knowledge when encountering familiar and less familiar language.
Vocabulary Progression
Vocabulary is deliberately revisited rather than confined to a single topic.
Pupils initially encounter and recall high-frequency vocabulary in concrete contexts.
As the curriculum develops, they:
retrieve vocabulary from earlier learning;
connect vocabulary across topics;
broaden and recombine their repertoire;
transfer words and expressions into new contexts;
and ultimately select language increasingly independently according to communicative purpose.
A word learned in one unit therefore becomes part of an expanding linguistic toolkit rather than disappearing when the class moves to another topic.
Grammar Progression
Grammar develops gradually through meaningful language.
Younger pupils initially encounter recurring chunks and patterns without needing extensive grammatical terminology.
They then progressively recognise and apply concepts such as:
gender and number;
articles;
possessives;
prepositions;
adjectival agreement;
negation;
connectives;
grammatical person;
infinitives;
and present-tense verb patterns.
Older pupils increasingly retrieve, compare and manipulate familiar grammatical systems rather than simply memorising rules in isolation.
Both schemes explicitly show this progression from recurring chunks to increasingly controlled and transferable grammatical systems.
Progression Across Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing
A balanced Primary Languages curriculum needs to develop all four language skills.
Listening
Pupils progress from recognising familiar words and chunks towards understanding sentences, exchanges and increasingly connected spoken language.
As their knowledge develops, they learn to use phonics, cognates, context and prior learning to extract meaning with decreasing reliance on immediate modelling.
Speaking
Speaking begins through imitation and reproduction of familiar language.
Pupils subsequently learn to give responses, ask and answer questions and construct increasingly developed sentences.
Later, they combine and manipulate familiar language, justify ideas and participate in longer exchanges and presentations with greater independence.
Reading
Early reading focuses on recognising familiar written language.
Pupils progressively apply phonics to decoding, understand sentences and connected texts, and use strategies including cognates, context and dictionaries appropriately.
By the later stages of the programme, pupils work with connected language with increasing independence.
Writing
Writing progresses from tracing, copying and adapting familiar language towards supported sentence construction.
Pupils then manipulate and extend sentences, use grammar and connectives and organise ideas into increasingly connected texts.
By Year 6, the aim is for pupils to select and recombine accumulated language for increasingly independent and purposeful writing.
The four strands are explicitly mapped across the five curriculum stages in both Schemes of Work.
Retrieval Is Built Into the Curriculum
Revision should not only happen immediately before an assessment.
Within Gramacri, retrieval is part of the curriculum architecture.
Previously taught vocabulary, phonics, grammar and language-learning strategies return:
within lessons;
later in the same unit;
across different units;
between year groups;
and at formal assessment points.
However, pupils are not simply asked to repeat previous learning.
Retrieved language is progressively connected, extended, transferred, transformed and applied.
For example, numbers learned initially as vocabulary may later support quantities, dates, prices or time.
Colours may later contribute to more developed physical or environmental descriptions.
Opinion structures can move between food, school, sport, leisure, travel and other contexts.
Previously learned grammar can therefore function across the curriculum rather than belonging permanently to one topic.
That is the difference between repetition and cumulative progression.
Assessment Within the Primary Languages Scheme of Work
Assessment is embedded throughout the French and Spanish programmes.
Each year contains three formal assessment points, following two-unit curriculum blocks in Autumn, Spring and Summer.
But assessment is not limited to a written test.
Teachers gather formative evidence throughout lessons through activities such as:
retrieval;
questioning;
phonics and pronunciation;
listening;
oral interaction;
reading;
sentence construction;
translation;
grammar;
connected writing;
games;
and classroom tasks.
As pupils progress, assessment increasingly looks beyond whether they can remember individual vocabulary items.
It considers whether pupils can:
retrieve learning after a delay;
recognise patterns;
connect previous and current learning;
understand increasingly connected language;
transfer knowledge into another context;
manipulate familiar grammar;
and select appropriate language with progressively less support.
Progress can therefore be seen not only in what pupils know, but in what they are increasingly able to do with what they know.
Adaptive Teaching and Inclusive Primary MFL
High expectations and accessibility do not need to compete.
Gramacri is designed around a shared, ambitious curriculum while allowing teachers to adapt the support pupils receive.
The programme uses resources and strategies including:
visual prompts and illustrations;
audio modelling;
vocabulary support and word banks;
sentence builders;
written models;
grammar tables;
colour coding;
repetition;
stories;
songs;
games;
translation;
model dialogues;
and structured interaction.
Support can be gradually reduced as pupils become increasingly secure.
Where differentiated Green, Orange and Red activities are used, these represent different levels of support and challenge rather than fixed ability groups.
Pupils can therefore work towards shared curriculum objectives through different amounts of scaffolding.
The long-term objective is not dependence on support.
It is increasing linguistic independence.
Culture, Intercultural Understanding and Global Learning
Learning French or Spanish is more than learning vocabulary and grammar.
Cultural and intercultural understanding develops throughout the Gramacri curriculum through exposure to France and the Francophone world, Spain and the wider Spanish-speaking world, alongside traditions, celebrations, communities and everyday life.
Environmental themes, biodiversity, sustainability and global issues also provide meaningful contexts in which pupils can apply language while developing awareness of the wider world.
This allows linguistic development and wider curriculum understanding to reinforce one another without turning MFL into another subject.
Preparing Pupils for Secondary MFL
The end of Year 6 should not represent the end of everything pupils have learned in primary languages.
The Gramacri curriculum is designed to establish linguistic foundations that pupils can carry into secondary education.
By the end of the programme, pupils should increasingly be able to:
retrieve previously learned language after a delay;
use phonics to support pronunciation and decoding;
understand increasingly connected spoken and written language;
recognise and manipulate familiar grammatical patterns;
select relevant vocabulary rather than relying exclusively on a supplied model;
combine previously learned language in new contexts;
and communicate with greater independence across listening, speaking, reading and writing.
The goal is therefore not simply to complete 30 units.
It is to leave pupils with a transferable linguistic toolkit for continued language learning.
That secondary-transition objective is explicit in both curriculum rationales.
Designed Around the Primary Languages National Curriculum
From Year 3 onwards, Gramacri provides a structured KS2 Languages programme designed to develop progressively pupils’ knowledge and competence across the principal areas of language learning.
The curriculum connects:
listening and responding;
spoken interaction;
pronunciation and phonics;
reading;
writing;
vocabulary;
grammar;
and cultural understanding
within a sequenced programme rather than treating the individual elements independently.
Year 2 provides an earlier introduction before statutory KS2 Languages begins, allowing pupils to develop confidence, listening habits and early linguistic foundations.
30 Progressive French Units. 30 Progressive Spanish Units.
Every Gramacri curriculum contains:
5 year groups
Year 2 → Year 6
6 units per year
30 progressive units per language
3 assessment points each year
2 languages
French and Spanish
And one connected curriculum journey:
Encounter → Build → Develop → Extend → Apply
The structure is deliberately designed to create regular opportunities for retrieval, consolidation and assessment while maintaining progression both within each academic year and between year groups.
A Curriculum Schools Can See, Explain and Deliver
A strong Primary Languages Scheme of Work should make it possible to answer important curriculum questions clearly:
- What have pupils learned before?
- Which prior knowledge are they building on now?
- Where does the level of challenge increase as they progress?
- How are phonics, vocabulary and grammar developing?
- How does learning progress across listening, speaking, reading and writing?
- When and how is previous knowledge retrieved?
- What evidence shows that pupils are making progress?
- By the end of Year 6, where should their learning have reached?
The Gramacri Schemes of Work are designed to make those connections explicit.
Teachers spend less time trying to construct long-term progression from individual resources.
Subject leaders gain a curriculum journey that can be clearly explained.
Pupils benefit from language learning in which what they learn today supports the language they will use tomorrow.
One Curriculum. Complete Teaching Resources.
The Scheme of Work provides the curriculum structure.
The Gramacri online platform provides the resources needed to deliver it.
Schools can access structured French and Spanish lessons supported by teaching presentations and activities designed around the same curriculum progression.
Rather than finding separate resources from different websites and trying to turn them into a coherent scheme, teachers can follow one connected learning journey from year to year.
Plan less. Teach more. Build language that lasts.
Frequently Asked Questions About Primary Languages Schemes of Work
What is a Primary Languages Scheme of Work?
A Primary Languages Scheme of Work sets out how language learning develops across year groups and over time. It should show more than a list of topics: it should explain how pupils progressively develop vocabulary, phonics, grammar, listening, speaking, reading and writing and how previous learning supports subsequent learning.
Does Gramacri provide a French Scheme of Work?
Yes. Gramacri provides a complete Primary French Scheme of Work from Year 2 to Year 6 consisting of 30 progressive units, with planned retrieval, cumulative progression and regular assessment.
Does Gramacri provide a Spanish Scheme of Work?
Yes. Gramacri provides a complete Primary Spanish Scheme of Work from Year 2 to Year 6 consisting of 30 progressive units, following the Encounter → Build → Develop → Extend → Apply curriculum journey.
Is KS2 Languages covered by the curriculum?
Yes. Year 2 provides an age-appropriate early introduction to language learning. From Year 3 onwards, pupils follow the structured KS2 programme.
How does Gramacri show progression in MFL?
Progression is mapped through phonics and pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, listening, speaking, reading, writing and cultural/intercultural understanding. Pupils progressively move from recognition and highly modelled language towards retrieval, transfer, manipulation and increasingly independent language use.
How is prior learning revisited?
Vocabulary, phonics and grammatical structures are deliberately retrieved within lessons, across units and between year groups. Previously learned language is then increasingly transferred and recombined in new contexts.
Does Gramacri include assessment?
Yes. Formative assessment takes place throughout teaching, while three formal assessment points are included in each year following the Autumn, Spring and Summer curriculum blocks.
How Gramacri support pupils with SEND?
The curriculum provides a shared ambitious learning journey while allowing teachers to adapt scaffolding and support. Visual resources, audio modelling, sentence builders, vocabulary support, structured interaction and differentiated levels of support help pupils access the same core learning.
Does the programme prepare pupils for secondary languages?
Yes. The progression towards Year 6 increasingly develops retrieval, phonics, grammatical understanding, connected language and independent communication to establish transferable foundations for future MFL learning.
Build a Primary Languages Curriculum That Progresses
Pupils move from their first encounters with French or Spanish towards increasingly independent language use.
Individual words gradually develop into connected communication.
Isolated topics become part of cumulative learning.
This progression continues from Year 2 to Year 6.
The Gramacri Primary Languages Scheme of Work gives schools a clear, cumulative curriculum journey from Yr 2 to Yr 6.
French & Spanish | Year 2–Year 6 | 30 Progressive Units Per Language
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