Practise spelling at home in ten minutes a day

Why ten minutes beats an hour

Spelling is one of the few parts of primary school work where short and frequent genuinely beats long and occasional. A word moves into long-term memory by being pulled out of it, not by being looked at, and each retrieval has to be separated from the last by enough time for a little forgetting to happen in between. Ten minutes on five evenings gives your child five separate retrievals of the same word. An hour on Sunday gives them one, spread thin, at the end of a day when nobody wants to be doing it.

There is a second reason, less academic and more practical. Ten minutes is a length of time a tired seven-year-old will agree to. A session your child finishes leaves them willing to sit down again tomorrow, and willingness is the scarce resource in family homework, not time. If an evening is going badly, stopping early costs you very little and protects the next four.

What the ten minutes are for

Give the first minute to the words your child got wrong yesterday, and only those. This is the highest-value minute of the session, and it is the one most often skipped in favour of starting the list again from the top.

The next six or seven minutes are the new work: five or six words, heard and written, one at a time. The order matters more than it looks. Your child should hear the word before they see it, write it down, and only then compare their attempt with the correct spelling. If they see the word first, they are copying, and copying feels like learning while teaching almost nothing. Reverse that order and the same six words become real practice.

Spend the last minute or two on marking, and let your child do it themselves. Put their attempt next to the correct word and ask them to underline the one letter or pair of letters that differs. "Separate" written with an e in the middle is a single wrong letter, not a wrong word, and a child who can see that has learnt something they can use tomorrow. Rewriting the whole word five times teaches the hand, not the memory.

The part parents get wrong

The most common mistake is spending the ten minutes on words your child already knows. It feels productive, the score is high, and nothing is learnt. Once a word has been written correctly twice on separate days, retire it for a fortnight and bring it back once to check.

The second mistake is reading the word out in a way that gives the answer away, by over-pronouncing the silent letter or stretching the vowel. Say it the way you would say it in a sentence. If your child cannot hear it, say it again at the same speed rather than a clearer one, because the classroom test will not slow down for them either.

The third is doing the session at the wrong end of the evening. Straight after school, before the bag is unpacked, works better for most children than after dinner, and much better than just before bed.

Where an app fits, and where it does not

Reading words aloud one at a time, waiting, marking, and keeping a note of which ones failed is a job that takes an adult's full attention for ten minutes. On most evenings that adult is also cooking. This is the narrow, unglamorous job Spelling Stars was built for: you type the week's list once, the words are read aloud in clear natural speech, and your child works through them alone while the app keeps the marking and shows you afterwards which words need another go.

What it does not replace is the conversation. Your child still needs someone to tell them that "knee" and "knife" start the same way, to notice that three of this week's misses are all the same vowel, and to decide that tonight is a night to stop after four words. A drill can give you the evidence and the repetitions. Deciding what to do about them is still yours.

Keeping it going past the first fortnight

Routines die at about day ten, when the novelty has gone and the next test is still far away. Two things keep them alive. The first is attaching the session to something that already happens every day, so it is not a decision anyone has to make: after the bag is unpacked, before the screen goes on. The second is letting your child see their own progress on the words that used to fail, rather than on the score. A list of five words that were wrong last Monday and right this Monday is the most motivating thing a struggling speller can be shown, and it costs nothing to keep.