Spell It

How to use it

Choose how long the words are: 3 letters is the easiest, 4 letters is in the middle and 5 letters is the biggest challenge. A round is five words.

1. Look at the big picture and read the clue under it. Tap 🔊 Hear it to listen to the word. If your device cannot talk, the button hides itself.
2. Tap the letter tiles in the right order. Each tile jumps into the next empty box. Two of the tiles are extras that are not in the word, so think carefully.
3. Made a mistake? Tap a letter in a box and it hops back to the tray. On a computer you can also type the letters, press Backspace to take one back and press Enter to check.
4. When every box is full, tap Check. A right answer turns the boxes green, and it wins a ⭐ when you got it on your first try without any help.
5. If it is not quite right, the letters in the right place stay green and the others hop back to the tray, so you only have to fix what is wrong. After three tries, Spell It spells the word with you and moves on. Nothing is ever lost.
6. Stuck? Tap Show a letter to fill in one correct letter. You can still finish the word, but that word does not earn a ⭐.

Spell It remembers which words you spell well and which are tricky. It keeps this on your own device only, so tricky words come round again and words you know well turn up less often. Want every word read out without tapping? Switch on Say each word on the first screen.

Why it works

Spelling is more than remembering a row of letters. It joins up four things: the sound of the word, its picture, its meaning and the pattern of letters. Spell It puts all four in front of you at once, which is why every word comes with a picture, a short clue and a voice.

Building a word one tile at a time slows you down in a good way. Many classrooms teach children to say a word slowly, listen for each sound and match the sounds to letters, and tapping the tiles is practice at exactly that. Because the tray also holds two extra letters, you have to choose each letter instead of just filling in the boxes.

The feedback is gentle on purpose. When you are nearly right, the letters in the right place stay put. That shows you what you already know and leaves only the tricky part to fix, which feels much better than wiping the whole word and starting again.

Practice that is spread out usually works better than practice that is crammed into one go. That is why a round is only five words, and why the words you find tricky come round again in later rounds instead of all at once.

For parents and teachers

Spell It is written for Years 1 to 3, roughly ages 6 to 9. The 3-letter words suit children who are just starting to spell whole words. The 5-letter words are a stretch for Year 2 and 3, and they are also useful for anyone who is learning English. One round takes about two minutes, so it works well as a warm-up.

The list has 252 words (46 with three letters, 94 with four and 112 with five). Each one was picked because a picture can show it: animals, food, clothes, things around the home, weather, numbers and colours. The spelling is Australian, so you will meet a lolly, a torch, a tram and a prawn.

Some ideas to try together:

• Say the word slowly first, listening for each sound, then build it. Afterwards, cover the picture and write the word on paper from memory.
• Look for rhymes in the list: pen, hen and ten; cat, bat and hat; bee, sea and tea. Which letters change, and which stay the same?
• Ask your child to use each word in a sentence, or to draw a picture of it and label it.
• In class, one child can tap the tiles while the group says the sounds. There is no sign-in, so it works on any shared tablet or laptop.

Progress is stored only in this browser, on this device. A child's stars and tricky words stay private and are not sent anywhere, and clearing the browser's site data starts again from scratch. The voice comes from the device, so how it sounds depends on the device and on whether it has an Australian English voice installed.

Spell It works with a mouse, a touchscreen or a keyboard. Every button has a label for screen readers, and the animation is gentle and switches off when a device asks for less motion.