Wheatfield Primary school children eat up French language lessons at lunchtime

Children at Wheatfield Primary School in Winnersh could be forgiven for telling people they go to L’Ecole de Champ de Ble after a lunchtime French club was launched – and proved an instant success.

The school only opened last September, as a one-form entry school, but the new lunchtime addition to the curriculum has gone down very well with the children and their parents, as 13 of them have already signed up and plenty more are waiting for spaces to become available in the class run by La Jolie Ronde, an award-winning company with over 30 years of experience teaching languages in schools across Britain and Ireland.

“We didn’t really know quite what sort of reaction to expect when we first offered it to the children, so we’ve been delighted at how enthusiastically they’ve embraced it,” said executive head teacher Bev Homer. “The teacher, Laurence Thonon, has really caught the children’s imagination – the fact that so many of them are willing to give up their lunchtime for an extra classroom activity is testament to that."

Just in case anyone thinks it is a strange choice of activity to introduce at such an early age, Mrs Homer says the exact opposite is true. “Exposing children to other languages so early on is actually a really good thing to do, because they don’t have some of the mental
barriers that people sometimes develop in later years. For them, French is just new knowledge to be absorbed, in the same way so many other things are at this age, so it’s less of an issue for them. And as the number of children doing it proves, it’s clearly something they’re enjoying, which makes it an even easier task.”