Latin Vision Statement

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 roots of a word they are creating a larger picture of meaning. In doing this, they are making links to the long-term memory. In this way they will know more and remember more.

As a 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 come from and also the roots of the words, which are usually from Latin and Greek. In every curriculum area at St. Joseph’s and St Gregory’s 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.

Please see the below documents which outline the Latin curriculum.