Creative and inspiring ideas for your primary languages display
It is the start of the school year and you have been digging deep for ideas and wondering what your primary languages display should look like. In this blog, I am going to share with you some ideas and examples of what you could include on your display and some different ways a display can be used.
Languages can be displayed in so many different ways. Displays can be used to celebrate children's work throughout the year or even a particular theme like European Day of Languages. Why not use your display to celebrate EDoL and give children the opportunity to celebrate their own home languages and other languages from around the world. You could also use your display to show how the children progress in the language from stages one to four and even consider making your display interactive. I hope this blog gives you some inspiration for your own displays at school.
Diversity on display
If, like many schools across the UK, your school has a wide range of home languages spoken, your language display could be a great way to celebrate these.
Haslam Park Primary School, Bolton
At Haslam Park Primary School in Bolton, they have used their languages display to celebrate European day of languages 2022. This year at Primary Languages Network, we celebrated this special day by learning and singing the rocket song, written by our very own Joanne. Based on the song, the children created their very own microphones of positivity, which focused on reaching for the sky to achieve their dreams and to give the message that anything is possible.
Haslam Park Primary School, Bolton
Children at Haslam Park were encouraged to create bilingual microphones of positivity, using both Spanish and their home languages. In the photos below you can see how some children included the flag of the country where their home language is spoken as well as some key words in both Spanish and their home language. It was evident that children felt a sense of pride in celebrating their home languages as well as Spanish on display in school. Perhaps this is something worth considering for your display for September 2023.
Make your display interactive
Photo: Queen’s Park Primary School, St Helens.
There are so many ways a display can be made interactive. First, why not use your languages display to celebrate phonics in Spanish, French or German. One of our network schools, Queens Park Primary School in St. Helens, shared their French display on Twitter and at PLN we just loved the idea of the 'phonics pockets'. Children add words to the phonics pockets as they learn, for example, ‘douze’ is placed in the ‘ou’ pocket. A big thank you to Mrs Taylor at the school for this fantastic idea and for sharing! This is a fantastic way to get children involved with the display as well as tracking progress with new vocabulary and phonics. They could even be used for retrieval practice throughout the year.
Haslam Park Primary School, Bolton
Why not make your display interactive by having the date in the target language as a central feature of your display? This is another way that Haslam Park in Bolton encourages the daily use of the language in the school. On a daily basis the designated language ambassadors change the date in the centre of the display at the start of the school day. This is a great way to demonstrate the importance of using the language outside of the lessons. The language ambassadors are also responsible for changing the date in Spanish in all classrooms throughout the school. In each classroom there is a mini display at the front of the class where the date is written in Spanish.
Time constraints
As many of us know already, planning a display and putting it together can be time-consuming. At Haslam Park they thought of and implemented a very clever idea to nominate language ambassadors in years five and six. These language ambassadors are responsible for updating the displays during the year and helping to get the displays ready. Do you have a language ambassador in your school? Why not implement this? These children show such pride in their role and love being involved in creating the displays.
Put a spotlight on progression
St Michael’s Catholic Primary School, Widnes
Books are one the first ways we think of to demonstrate the progress our children make in school. Why not have this progress on display? It is a great idea to divide your display board into sections for each stage of learning or year group. Displaying work across the stages in one central place emphasises the progression made from stage one through to stage four. The display can show clear progress in writing from using single words in stage one to full sentences, opinions and adjectives in stage four. Here is an example from St Michael’s Catholic Primary School in Widnes. It displays work from stage one learners using words to describe their animal masks, stage two learners designing and describing their own aliens to stage four learners who designed and described their own funfairs in the style of a triarama.
Remember that your display does not have to be limited to showing progress across just key stage two. St Ann's Primary School in Sheffield have split their display board to show work in KS1 too and just look at the creativity and colourful work from the children.
I hope this blog has given you some ideas that you can take away and use in your own schools. Please feel free to contact the team at Primary Languages Network with any questions. Similarly, once you have your new display please share with the team, we would love to see them.
Lisa Ormes
Associate Primary Languages Teacher
Lisa Ormes is an associate language teacher at PLN specialising in Spanish and has worked with us for the last four years across a number of schools. Lisa has a wealth of teaching experience including secondary and sixth form as well as English as a Foreign Language in Spain and Japan. She is passionate about helping our young learners to become independent language detectives whilst developing a love for languages.