ABC Gap fits the screen again. On smaller iPhones the top of the alphabet was cut off and the "drag the missing letter" line hid behind the big letter keys, with no way to scroll to them. The keys now give up a little height so the whole a-z and the hint are always in view, and every full-screen game now sizes itself to the space the app really leaves it rather than to the whole screen. Colour It and Draw It now show a Premium tag on the games page. They are the two games the daily free goes do not cover, and the tag says so before a child opens one. Every game now says what to do when your child opens it. Children who can't read yet hear the task ("Fix the word", "Which dog is this?") in a warm recorded voice, with a British or American accent to match where you are. It speaks once when they switch games, not on every round, and stays quiet when Game Sounds is off. Fredle's "Show me a word" now really does speak in a British voice for children in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, India and Singapore, and says a word the first time it is asked. Fixed a games page that could slide sideways on a phone. Fredle speaks every word it asks for. Words like laugh, whisper, angrily, announcer and joyful used to trace in silence when a child asked to be shown one. The voice that records them was reading those words as instructions on how to speak rather than words to say, so they came back empty or acted out, and 350 of them had been written off as words the voice simply could not manage. Asked a different way, every single one of them says itself perfectly well. Go Premium now opens the plans straight away in the app, with no sign-up step first. One road out of the free goes. The strip along the bottom and the daily wall both offer Premium now, and tapping it opens the plans with the prices on them instead of a sign-in form. Signing in is not part of buying: the account arrives with the subscription. If you already subscribe and you are on a new device, "Already a member? Sign in" sits under the plans. Premium on the web now starts with 7 days free, the same as in the app stores. Read the Clock now fits a small phone: two of its four answers used to sit behind the 'free goes left' strip, so a child had to scroll to see what they could choose. Every game now sizes its picture to the space the screen really leaves — Find the Frog, Name the Flower, Doggies, Kitties and Dinos keep their answers and their how-to line in view too. The front page is now a games page. Every game in the suite is there, grouped by what it teaches — Popular, Phonics and Spelling, Numbers, Calming, Knowledge, Art, Logic and Languages — with the row of buttons at the top to show one group at a time. Tick or Fix has moved to a page of its own. Old links to it still work. The game menu is now grouped by what a game teaches: Phonics and Spelling, Numbers, Calming, Knowledge, Art, Logic and Languages. Whichever game your child is in, the same headings are there when you go looking for the next one. Kitty Jigsaw sits under Calming now, with the rainbow and the cake, and its stars collect a Jigsaw badge of their own rather than counting towards Animals. Fred Sort has been retired and is no longer in the menu. The games page no longer marks which games are Premium; the tags are gone from the cards. You no longer need an account to play on the web: every child gets nine free goes a day, signed in or not. Sign in when you want their stars kept on every device. You stay signed in while you play. Your account no longer signs itself out after a month. Still calm, still ad-free.

Fredle and Tick or Fix no longer ask a child to sound out words that cannot be sounded out. Fourteen words Read Write Inc teaches by sight, why and here and mother among them, were being offered as ones to decode. They are still there to find, and still count. Fredle now counts the tricky words. Words like great, world, music and talk have never scored, at any age. They sit on the list of words the phonics scheme cannot sound out, and the game treated that whole list as bonus, so a Year 6 child was losing credit for roughly one word in eight on every board. Most of those words are not tricky at all. Only about seventy of them are the exception words a teacher actually teaches by heart; the rest are ordinary words that simply need a spelling pattern the early phonics sets do not cover. Each one now arrives in the school year the curriculum teaches it. A Reception child still meets only the small named handful, and older children get the rest as they go. Still calm, still ad-free.

Spell Duel now matches your child's school year. It threw the same words at everyone, so a five-year-old on a winning run ended up spelling "strawberry" on a blank keyboard. Now a Reception child only gets words their class can sound out, and words like "chocolate" wait for the year children learn whole words by sight. In the spelling games you can now tap a letter to put it in the word as well as drag it, and drag placed letters to fix the order. Stuck on a word in Tick or Fix? Tap New word under the board for a different one. It gives nothing away about the word it drops. Changing the school year on Fredle now redraws the board cleanly. The letter grid changes shape with the year, and rebuilding it in place could leave the found-words list drawn underneath the tiles. It waits until you close the year sheet, so you can still read what that year teaches first. Find the Frog is a spelling game now, once your child is reading. Reception still taps the word; from Year 1 they spell it. The five position words stay the same, because they are what the game is for, but the help does not: letters laid out at first, then mixed with wrong ones, and by the end just a keyboard. Fixed a blank screen that could cover a game and refuse to go away. If you signed in while we were changing the welcome flow, the app could come back to a step that no longer existed and show an empty sheet with no button, on every page. It now carries on to the game list. Flagle now says the country out loud. Tap the right flag and it names the country; tap a wrong one and it names the one you picked, so a guess still teaches a flag. Flagle is for children who cannot read yet, and the name is the whole lesson. Fredle now says the word your child just found, out loud, as it pops up. The rhyme card that used to interrupt the game is gone. Fredle now sounds words out in a British voice for children in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, India and Singapore. Words like car and bird used to come back with an American r in them. Fredle sounds out 700 more words, and says a few of them right that it used to get wrong. Village and image were sounded out with a long vowel, as vill-ayge, and now use the short one. In Find the Frog, the frog now hides properly. He used to float clear above the car when he was meant to be behind it, so a child who read the picture correctly could still be marked wrong. Kitty Jigsaw: dragging a piece no longer wakes your phone's back or home gesture. Pieces sat on the very edge, where a sideways drag is what Android uses to go back, so one could drop mid-move. They now sit clear of both edges. Menus and pop-ups now hold the game still. Opening the games menu, settings, the year picker or a picture zoom used to leave the page free to scroll underneath, so a stray finger slid the whole board away behind it. Spell Duel plays in a shorter frame: the sky above the throw was mostly empty, so the arena lost about a hundred pixels. Three picture words left the game too, because a pool, a road and a beach are places rather than things a child can name. New game: Spelldle, now in the games menu for everyone. Guess the hidden word in six goes. The word length and the words themselves come from your child's school year. The games menu is now sorted into sections: Phonics, Maths, Languages, Nature, Geography, Art, Making things and Games. Finding the game you want no longer means reading the whole list. The games menu keeps the youngest games together now. Past Year 2, ABC Gap, b or d, Fred Sort and Find the Frog move to a "For younger children" section at the foot, so what they are working on sits at the top. Nothing is removed. The puzzle board now stays put while you scroll. On a phone, scrolling the list of words you have found used to make the grid grow and shrink under your finger, as the browser's toolbar slid away. Fredle, Sumdle, Flagle, Kitty Jigsaw and the picture games all hold their size now. Still calm, still ad-free.

Fredle can now sound a word out for you. Press "Show me a word" and, as the trace lights each tile, a clear British voice says that sound, then says the whole word blended, the way a teacher does. It works for every word a child up to Year 3 can be asked. Short phonics words are sounded out sound by sound; longer words and spelling-list words are said whole. It only ever speaks a word your child has given up on and asked to see. While a word is still theirs to work out, the game stays silent, so the decoding stays theirs. The voice plays even with the ringer switch on silent, the way a video would, so the volume buttons are the control. Game Sounds in the school-year settings turns it off altogether. The first time it speaks, a small "Sound on" reminder appears once. Singapore and Canada are now in the school-year picker, so a child there gets the words their own school year teaches. Singapore has one national syllabus: K1 and K2, then Primary 1 to Primary 6. Canada sets its curriculum province by province, so there is a board for Ontario and one for British Columbia, from Kindergarten to Grade 6. Each year explains what it covers before you pick it. Canadian children also get Canadian spelling for the first time. They are asked for "colour", "centre", "defence" and "travelled" as a British child is, and for "organize", "tire", "mom" and "math" as an American one — rather than one country's spellings throughout. Canadian families can now pick Alberta as well as Ontario and British Columbia, from Kindergarten to Grade 6. Alberta publishes what it teaches grade by grade, right down to which letter pairs and word endings belong to which year, so the words your child is asked for follow their own curriculum closely. Tick or Fix now has the same school-year button as Fredle. Your child's flag and school year sit in the header, and tapping them opens the picker, so moving a child up a year takes one tap from the game itself. The settings cog is gone: the sound switch and Start over live in that picker now. The cog used to offer a "Change school year" link, and that link never arrived anywhere. Tapping it opened the sign-in or membership panel instead, on the website and in the app, so the only way to change the year was through the account page. In b or d, the settings no longer mention a school year. That game is deliberately the same at every age, because telling b from d is an early-years skill, and saying otherwise was misleading. The curriculum pages on the website now cover Singapore and Canada as well as the UK and US: one page per school year, explaining what that year teaches and opening a game already set to it. Twenty-two new pages, all of them written from the same curriculum research the games use, so what a parent reads and what their child is asked for cannot drift apart. Signing in from the account page now offers Apple and Google, the same sheet as everywhere else on the site. It used to ask for an email address and nothing else. On the web, arriving there signed out takes you straight to that prompt rather than to a page with nothing on it. Still calm, still ad-free.

Tell us your child's school year, and the words follow it. Fredle, Tick or Fix and Sumdle used to ask you to pick a difficulty out of thin air. Now they take it from the school year you choose once, matched to your country's own curriculum, and the words, the board size and the sums all move with it. Nothing to guess at, and it keeps up as your child moves up. Spelling comes to three more games. In Make a Cake, Build a Building and Make a Rainbow, children in Year 1 and above now spell each ingredient, brick and colour on a letter bank instead of dragging a labelled picture. Reception keeps the picture-matching exactly as it was. Spelling is something you do now, not something you guess. Tapping every letter in turn used to give the answer away one letter at a time. A letter counts when your child drags it into place, and the whole word is checked once it is finished. Every game has had a tidy-up. One calm colour for anything you tap, photographs and boards left white so they stay easy to read, and a lot of panels, borders and labels taken away so the game itself is what you see. Fixes: the paint blobs in Make a Rainbow can be dragged again on smaller phones, the Android back swipe no longer interrupts the game you are playing, British spellings now appear properly on iPhone and iPad, and the letter drawer in ABC Gap is readable in dark mode and sits clear of the home bar. Spell Duel sorts its words by how hard they are to spell rather than how long they are, so a tricky short word no longer turns up before an easy long one. Fredle's word list shows every word it asks for: a few were counted in the total but never listed, which quietly made the last words of a puzzle impossible to find. Still calm, still ad-free.

Small fixes and improvements under the hood. Nothing has changed in the games themselves — this update corrects how the app reports an install, so we can tell which of our own ads actually bring families to Tadpole and stop paying for the ones that do not. As before: no advertising identifier is ever read, no tracking permission is asked for, and nothing about what your child does in the app is shared.

Spell Duel is here. Something comes flying at your frog — a carrot, a crocodile, a helicopter — and the thing in the air is the word. Spell it before it lands, and naming it stops it dead in the air. • The picture is the only clue, so the word has to be worked out, not copied. • Get three in a row and the words get longer. Miss one and it eases back, and it never drops below a length you have already mastered. • It starts at three letters with the letters laid out for you, and climbs to ten — helicopter, playground, toothbrush — spelled on a bare keyboard with no help at all. • Both duellists are the Tadpole frog. The one doing the throwing wears a pirate's bandana and an eye patch. It is the first Tadpole game made for older children, roughly seven to eleven, and the first with a clock. There are no lives, no health bars and no way to lose — just a timer you can beat. Also in this update: a purchase could fail if our advert measurement was slow to answer. It no longer can. Still calm, still ad-free.

Spell Duel gets the Tadpole look: • Both duellists are now the Tadpole frog rather than a jumble of animals, and the one doing the throwing wears a pirate hat. • You spell the thing being thrown, and it is always shown as a picture — so the word is decoded, not just copied. Also in this update: • Fredle's Year 3/4 and Year 5/6 tiers play on a bigger 4x4 board, so the long statutory spellings — disappear, interfere, parliament — actually fit and can be found. • Puzzles build much faster, so there is less waiting when you start a game or change difficulty. Behind the scenes, this version lets us tell whether our own adverts brought someone to the app. It is measured by Apple, in aggregate, and there is no tracking prompt, no advertising identifier, and nothing collected about what your child plays. Our privacy policy sets out exactly what is and is not shared. Still calm, still ad-free.

Fredle gets a bigger board for older children: • The Year 3/4 and Year 5/6 spelling tiers now play on a 4x4 grid. The statutory spellings for those years are long words, and most of them simply never fitted on the small board — disappear, interfere, parliament and the rest can finally be found. • Every one of those puzzles now holds at least one of the year's statutory spellings, so the tier actually teaches the words it is named after. • Puzzles are built far more quickly, so there is much less waiting when you start a game or change difficulty. Also fixed: • Games use the whole screen properly, instead of squashing into the top of it with empty space underneath. • Deleting your account no longer tells you your subscription has ended when it has not. • Buttons no longer stay looking pressed after you tap them. Still calm, still ad-free.

Two new games, and polish all round: • Le or La and El or La — French and Spanish gender games, one little word at a time • Find the Frog has fresh, clearer pictures and a right answer that actually looks right • Flagle holds the country name on screen longer, so there's time to read it • Answer buttons are cream now — easier to read, and the one you got right stands out • Already a member on our website? Log in from the app and everything unlocks — no second purchase • Signing in, signing out and deleting your account all work properly, from anywhere in the app • Word list tidy-up so every word sounds out just right, and app updates apply cleanly Still calm, still ad-free.

More words to discover! • Dozens of new everyday words to find — penguin, carrot, dinosaur, jumper and lots more • Cleaner phonics: every word you spot now sounds out the way it should Still calm, still ad-free.

Six new games for little learners: • Tell the Time & Read the Clock • Make a Rainbow — colours • Number Words • b or d • Find the Frog Plus collectable reward cards to celebrate every win. Still calm, still ad-free.

Adding subscriptions in app