Bacon's College — A Spanish workbook that puts classroom language in students' hands

The brief

Bacon's College came to us for a Spanish workbook that would do more than hold notes. The MFL department wanted a book that lived on the desk in every lesson — one a student could open mid-task to find the phrase they needed, the rule they'd forgotten, or the word they kept misspelling.
The team had a clear view of what tends to slow students down: not knowing how to ask permission in the target language, running out of connectives when writing extended answers, and losing the same vocabulary again and again because there's nowhere consistent to record it. They wanted those three problems solved on the inside cover, not buried in a textbook.
The workbook also needed to set the tone from page one — Spanish as something useful, spoken by hundreds of millions of people, worth the effort — rather than opening straight into grammar.

What we designed

Working with the Bacon's MFL team, we built a Spanish workbook anchored on a few reference spreads students return to constantly, with lined pages in between for everyday class work.

An opening "Why Study Spanish?" page setting out the case for the language — 425 million speakers across more than 20 countries, the third most-spoken language on earth, a route into study in Spain and into international organisations like the UN and EU.
A classroom routines page ("ALWAYS…") covering the non-negotiables students are expected to follow every lesson — from the seating plan to writing in blue or black pen, underlining titles with a ruler, and being polite to everyone at all times.
A "My Misspelt Words" section so students have one fixed place to log the words they keep getting wrong, rather than scattering them through the book.
A classroom-language spread covering Spanish phrases students actually need in lessons: greetings (formal, informal and plural forms), asking permission ("¿puedo ir al baño?", "¿puedo hablar en inglés?"), reporting problems ("He olvidado mis deberes"), checking understanding ("¿Puede repetir?", "¿Puede hablar más despacio?"), agreeing and disagreeing, and what to say when they've finished ("¡He terminado! ¿Cómo puedo mejorar mi trabajo?").
A Spanish terminology reference spread with the building blocks for longer answers — opinion phrases ("Pienso que", "En mi opinión", "Diría que"), connectives, time expressions, sequencers ("Primero", "Luego", "Por fin"), advantages and disadvantages, and a core verb and adjective list ("Me gusta", "Tengo", "Divertido", "Aburrido").

The finished book

The workbook gives every Bacon's student the same reference points to hand in every Spanish lesson — the phrases to run the classroom in Spanish, the connectives to extend their writing, and one consistent place to track the words they're still learning to spell.