Jenny Bell

Fun facts:
According to my partner, I can sleep-talk in both English and Spanish. A talent our children now share: the language they are sleep-talking in determines which one of us gets up to go and see them!

As a teenager, I played the flute in France and Italy with the youth orchestra I was part of. We had so much fun and I have so much respect for the adults who took responsibility for us all before the days of mobiles. I can’t imagine anything more stressful! In an Italian town called Soave, they made us all chocolate pizza to have after the concerts – it was amazing!

I visited Vancouver and the highlight was going on a bear-spotting trip. We could get out and see brown bears (from a safe distance!) in their natural habitat. It was amazing, and seeing a bear cub frolic down by a river was just incredible.

On my year abroad in Spain I worked as a language assistant in a Primary School. Year 6 had a school trip to a local indoor ski slope and I was invited along to help out. Having never skied before, I thought it would be fun to try, but ended up zooming down the slope backwards in front of all the children as the headteacher frantically tried to catch me before I did myself, or someone else, an injury.

I am a genuine linguaphile and love reading books and listening to podcasts about languages. I was delighted to have one of my questions read out on “Something Rhymes with Purple” (a podcast about the etymology of words) and made all of my family members listen to the response. In case you were wondering, I asked why the Spanish, English, French, German and Italian words for “butterfly” are so different – the response was very interesting. I also couldn’t wait to go to the British Museum exhibition about the Rosetta Stone.

More about Jenny
Jenny Bell has a first-class Spanish degree and has been teaching Spanish in primary schools for 8 years.

Knowing how children loved learning with Luc et Sophie, Jenny has used her expertise to create a Spanish version of the story-based scheme of work for us – Learn Spanish with Luis y Sofía.

Following on from this successful conversion of one of our schemes into another language, Jenny then tackled producing Physical Spanish Phonics (based on our much loved Physical French Phonics resource).