Make a spelling test from your own words
Type each word on its own line, with a sentence beside it where the sound alone would not be enough. Click a line number to split the list into units — one unit is one sitting, so twelve words can be a Friday test or four short ones. Everything else follows from the list: speaking, marking, printing, scheduling.
Typing the list, and the one piece of syntax there is
Paste the words straight out of whatever the school sent. Numbered lines, bullets, stray commas and trailing full stops are stripped, because none of those are being spelt, and a child who typed run should never be marked wrong for a list that said run!. Blank lines and duplicates disappear too.
There is no syntax to learn. Each word has a box beside it for a sentence, and where you fill one in the voice reads the word, then the sentence, then the word again. It is worth doing for homophones and for anything where the tense is ambiguous, and it is not worth doing for the other nine words. Where you leave it empty, a sentence already written for that word is used if the site has one.
What comes out of a saved list
A spoken sitting in two flavours: practice, which marks each word as it is answered so a mistake can be corrected while the word is still in mind, and test, which stays silent until the end the way a real Friday test does. Both hide the list while they run, because a test you can read off the screen is a copying exercise.
Then paper. A numbered sheet with writing lines and a name line, an answer key for whoever is marking, and a look-cover-write-check grid for the week — all printed by the browser from the same words, with no file to download and no watermark. And a queue: every word answered goes into the practice schedule automatically.
Where the list is kept, and who else can open it
A new list is saved straight away as a draft and reopening it is two taps from the home page. Drafts last thirty days, which is longer than the week most lists are set for; sign in and the same list stops expiring and shows up on whichever phone or laptop you next open. Nothing is retyped and nothing is exported by hand.
A kept list can be handed to other people three ways: published to the catalogue for anybody to find, sent as a single link to a whole class, or split into one labelled link per child so the marks come back separately. None of them asks the person at the other end to register, and no child ever types anything but the spelling.
Common questions
How many words can one list hold?
Up to a hundred, which is far more than a weekly test needs. Twelve to twenty is the usual size. The sitting is not capped by the site, but a child’s attention is capped at about fifteen minutes and that is the real limit.
Can I use words with apostrophes or hyphens?
Yes. `don’t`, `it’s`, `mother-in-law` and `well-being` are single spelling words and the marks inside them are part of the spelling. Punctuation wrapped around the outside of a word is removed; punctuation inside it is kept.
Does it work for languages other than English?
Partly. Accented letters are preserved and never folded away — café and cafe are different spellings, and this is the one place that distinction is the whole point — so a French or Spanish list marks correctly. Whether it is read aloud well depends on which voices the device has installed.
What happens to a list when I close the tab?
A saved one is waiting when you come back; an unsaved one is not, so save before starting if you want it next week. A saved list stays a draft for thirty days and is then deleted outright unless you have signed in, because a list nobody owns is not worth keeping.