Foss Class Curriculum Letter Summer Term 2024

Dear Parents, 

We hope you have all had a fantastic Easter break and your children are ready for their last term of this academic year.  Time has flown in Foss this year!  By the time you read this letter the Foss team and I will have welcomed the children back into school and we’ll be underway with the exciting learning we have ahead of us, for our Year 2 children, their last year in Key Stage 1. 

Topic/English 

Our topic this summer term is a history-based topic called ‘School Days’ where we will learn about the differences between schooling in the Victorian era and schooling as we know it today at Langton. We will learn about objects found in a Victorian classroom and how they were used. We shall also be researching Samuel Wilderspin, an important figure in the development of schooling for young children in the Victorian era, whose ideals are reflected in schooling today, and learn to describe the passage of time through the study of past, present and future tense vocabulary. 

Our class text for this half of the term is ‘The Magic Finger’ by Roald Dahl.  This fantastic book is a story narrated by an unnamed eight-year-old girl who has secret magic powers.  It starts with her promising to never use her secret abilities again after she had turned her poor schoolteacher Mrs Winter into a cat! She goes on to tell the story of “something very funny” that happened the week before to her neighbours: the Greggs!  We shall use this text to help us: write some instructions, to learn to write a persuasive argument and to develop our own narratives. 

For the second half of the term our class text is ‘The Storm Whale’ by Benji Davis. This beautiful picture book follows the story of a lonely little boy called Noi and his fisherman father who live in a house by the sea, when, one day, he finds a baby whale washed up on the beach after a storm.  This story is about a friendship and how it changes both of their lives forever.  We shall be looking closely at the vocabulary and grammar used in this moving text and use it to help write our own narrative. 

Throughout this term, we will continue to have our daily, phonics/spelling sessions as well as our guided reading time each day.  As always, any extra reading that your child does at home, please record in their reading records as evidence of their wider reading. Spellings tests for the Year 2’s will continue to be on a Friday morning, so children will need their yellow spelling books with them that day.  Homework will follow the same pattern as last term with the Year1’s just needing to complete the topic homework task every fourth week and the Year 2’s completing the English and Maths in-between those tasks. 

Maths 

In maths this term the Year 1’s will be starting with the unit of multiplication and division.  They will: learn to count in steps of 2, 5 and 10, use sharing and grouping to solve division problems and begin to understand the relationship between multiplication and division. Next the children will be looking at fractions: learning that halving is sharing equally into two parts or groups, understanding how to find a quarter and that finding a half is the same as dividing by 2 and finding a quarter is the same as dividing by 4. 

Our daily maths lessons for our Year 2 children will help them recognise quarters and halves and introduce the idea of thirds. Learning to tell the time is a vital skill that the children will also return to this term.  As well as telling O’clock and half past times, the children will learn quarter past and quarter to the hour, followed by recognising the number of minutes past and to an hour. In the second half of the term the children will learn to interpret and draw tally charts, tables and pictograms.  Finally, we shall end the year by looking at some more geometry based on describing position and direction. 

Science 

Our first science topic this term is ‘Animals including humans’. This topic allows the children to learn how to identify and name a variety of common animals including fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. They learn how to identify, describe and compare a variety of animals that are carnivores, herbivores and omnivores, as well as understanding that animals have offspring that grow into adults.  In our second science topic we shall be looking at ‘Living things and their habitats’. They learn how to identify and name a variety of plants and animals in their habitats, including microhabitats; and describe how animals obtain their food from plants and other animals, using the idea of a simple food chain, and identify and name different sources of food. 

PSHE 

Our first PSHE topic this term is called ‘Becoming an active citizen’.  With in this topic the children will look at what people need to live, how they contribute to life in our class and in school as a whole, what groups and communities they may belong to and how we can improve and look after our environment. After half term our learning finishes with the topic ‘Moving on’ where the children can reflect on their achievements and strengths from this year and have a chance to discuss any concerns they may have about moving into the next year and things they might be looking forward to. 

Music 

Our music lessons this half of the term will focus on a song called ‘Round and Round’.  This is a song written in a Latin Bossa Nova style by Joanna Mangona, specially written for classroom use to teach children about different musical dimensions. As we move towards the second half of the term, we will be finishing by studying and performing a song called Hey You! This is written in an Old-School Hip Hop style for children to learn about the differences between pulse, rhythm and pitch and to learn how to rap and enjoy it in its original form. 

P.E 

P.E for Foss Class will continue to be on Monday afternoons with myself and with Mr Cairns on a Wednesday afternoon.  PE lessons will be outside whenever possible this term, but please can you make sure that your child has shorts as well as jogging bottoms in their PE kits, in case of wet weather and we need to use the indoor equipment in the hall instead.   

As you can see, we have another fun packed and busy final term ahead.  We look forward to seeing some of you in our Good Work Assemblies on alternate Fridays, but in the meantime please grab me at the start or end of the day if you have any queries.  Alternatively, you can drop me an email at fossclass@langton.n-yorks.sch.uk .  

With best wishes 

Jo Huntriss & the Foss Team