It has been an incredibly busy and productive week in Year 1, and we are bursting with pride at the dedication the children have shown toward their learning -to-read skills, from "special friends" spotting and confident blending, to more fluent, expressive reading, and trickier Set 2 and Set 3 sounds.

This hard work is the perfect foundation as we begin to prepare for the upcoming Phonics Screening Check. To the children, this is simply a chance to show off the "reading muscles" they have been building all year. We have been spending time practising with both real words and those silly "alien" words to ensure they can apply their phonetic knowledge to any combination of letters.

You can continue this momentum at home by spending just five or ten minutes a day reading together. Whether you are hunting for specific digraphs in a favourite story or making up silly names for toys using their sounds, your support is invaluable. Thank you for your continued support with reading skills – it is clearly paying off in the brilliant progress we are seeing every single day!