Reading Buddies Building Confidence

11th December 2025Thomas White

This week, our Reading Buddies programme has been in full swing, and it’s been brilliant to see. Our older, confident readers have been supporting younger students with their pre-reads, helping them practise tricky words, build fluency, and talk about the story before they meet it in class.

They’ve shown maturity, independence and genuine care in the way they guide and encourage their partners. The younger children have absolutely loved the one-to-one attention, and their confidence is growing every session.

It’s been a lovely reminder that reading isn’t just a skill, it’s something we share as a community.

Christmas

11th December 2025Elizabeth Frost

Crew Frost has loved getting into the Christmas spirt! We have been lucky enough to have a visit from Santa and receive a book each. Next we have been working hard in provision getting our decorations made for our tree and using our school logo as the tree topper. In expedition, we have been learning all about the Nativity, who is in it and why we celebrate it. We can’t wait to show our very own Nativity next week! Well done crew Frost!

Text Marking in Reading

8th October 2025Charlotte Newman

Today Crew McLoughlin have been working extra hard on their text marking in reading. While using their highlighters and pencils, they identified key ideas, annotated tricky words and added extra detail to show their understanding. Everyone showed great focus and teamwork, discussing their ideas and supporting one another. Well done, Crew McLoughlin – your reading skills are getting stronger every day!

Confidence is key!

12th September 2025Laura Hamill

Today in our reading lesson, we worked really hard as a crew and showed just how confident we have become at discussing the texts we read. We had in-depth discussions about our text and made some great links to our expedition topic. Mrs. Rankin was incredibly impressed with our ideas and opinions, and we were proud of how well we used our retrieval skills to answer questions. We are really growing as readers and enjoying our non-fiction texts along the way!

Demonstration Comprehension

1st July 2025Laura Hamill

Today, our crew worked hard in their demonstration comprehension lesson. We focused on the next chapter of our class text, Dark Flood, and tested our fluency by aiming to read 185 words in one minute, in line with the Year 6 expected standard. Following this, we worked with Miss as she modelled how to accurately answer a comprehension question, thinking about the best strategies that we could use. We focused on questions that had arisen as a problem for us based on our recent assessments. Once we’d done this, we then worked in pairs to attempt to answer some of our own questions, before coming back together as a crew to check if we all agreed on the answers.

A-m-a-z-i-ng Ph-o-n-i-c-s

26th March 2025Natasha Holdsworth

I would just like to praise these children for their continued progression when learning their sounds. Some even started Year 1 still learning Set 1 sounds and are now nearly at the end of their Set 3 sounds! Their love for learning really does shine through and we are so proud of you! Keep up the great work. Fred the Frog is so impressed!

World Book Day

7th March 2025Ruth Shields

It was fantastic to see so many children dressed up for World Book Day. We even had a dinosaur loose in the classroom.

In crew, we checked in by telling the crew which character they’d come as.

After break, we read with Crew Robson which was such a lovely time. It was lovely hearing the children read to younger children but also to hear them being confident enough to read to older children. And of course this was even better with a biscuit.

Well done to the effort and creativity that went into the paper plate challenge. Unfortunately we couldn’t give everyone a prize but well done to Lily-Ann and Emily.

Reading

27th February 2025Laura Hamill

Crew Hamill have focused on a newspaper article about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in our reading lessons this week. We have had lots of opportunities to practice our fluency using various strategies including chunk, chunk, scoop and chorus reading. This has allowed us to work on our words per minute and we have also discussed our intonation when reading, ensuring we do not sound monotonous and boring! We have also practiced our automaticity words each day. We enjoyed today’s activity in which we created our own spinners using a pencil and paper clip! Following this, we have worked in pairs to solve reason to read questions and demonstration comprehension questions.

Together We Grow.

25th February 2025Gillian Gilliland

This week in reading, we have been looking at the poem titled “Together We Grow.”

Today, the children performed the poem. Some children recited their verse’s with quiet contemplation, while others brought their lines to life with bold gestures.

Together, they created a beautiful mosaic of voices that truly captured the essence of the poem.