Your spelling tests, read aloud

A test grades Friday. Practice is what changes Monday.

Every free spelling site does the same thing: it reads a list out, counts the ones your child got right, and forgets all of it the moment the tab closes. The number tells a parent what they already suspected. It does not do anything about it, and next Friday the same six words go wrong again.

The gap between those two Fridays is where this site works. A word that was missed is not simply reported — it is put in a queue and offered again tomorrow, then two days later, then four, then eight, moving up only while the answers stay right and dropping straight back to the beginning the moment one does not. That spacing is the single best-evidenced idea in the study of memory, and applying it to twelve spelling words takes about four minutes a day.

Nothing has to be configured for it to happen. Take a sitting, and the schedule builds itself out of what was actually typed.

Letters, not a number out of ten

When a word comes back wrong, the review lays the two spellings side by side, letter for letter: the invented c in neccessary struck through, the skipped a in seperate shown as a gap, the swapped pair in recieve sitting in the wrong order. Green letters are the ones that were already right, and on most misses that is nearly all of them.

That matters more than it sounds. A child who is told they got six out of ten learns that they are bad at spelling. A child who sees that they wrote eight of the nine letters of beautiful correctly and put the u in the wrong place learns something they can actually do differently. The same code produces the mark and the picture, so the two can never disagree.

Heard properly, including the words that sound the same

The voice already installed on the phone, tablet or laptop reads the word, then a sentence containing it, then the word again — the order a teacher uses at the front of a class. No audio file is fetched and nothing is recorded.

The sentence is not decoration. Read out on its own, their, there and they’re are one sound and the test becomes a guess; heard inside "put their coats on the hook" it is a spelling question again. Every built-in word ships with a sentence written to disambiguate it, and every list you type has a box beside each word for your own.

Nothing to join, and the list can become a link

Take a test, print a sheet or practise for twenty minutes without being asked for anything. The first list you save is kept as a draft for thirty days, which covers the week it was set for. Signing in — one emailed link, no password to invent — is what makes it permanent, and it is the only moment an address is ever wanted.

A kept list has somewhere to live. Publish it and it gets a page of its own that reads properly in a browser, prints, and can be taken by anyone you send it to — a class, a grandparent, a childminder — with nothing to install and no account at their end. Send one link to everybody and you get back which words the group found hardest; send a separate labelled link to each child and the scores come back one row each.