Spelling test tomorrow? A plan for tonight

First, find out what your child actually cannot spell

The evening before a test is not the time to practise the whole list. It is the time to find the four or five words that will cost marks tomorrow and spend everything you have on those.

So start by testing, not by teaching. Read the whole list out once, in a random order, and have your child write every word without any help. Do not correct as you go and do not react; a raised eyebrow at word six will change how they write word seven. This takes about five minutes for a list of twenty and it tells you more than an hour of revision would.

Then mark it together. You will usually find the list splits three ways: the words your child knows cold, one or two they are unsure of, and a small group that are genuinely wrong. Everything that follows is about that last group. The words they already know need nothing tonight, however good it feels to practise them.

Fix the wrong words one letter at a time

Take each failed word and find the exact point where it went wrong, because it is almost never the whole word. Put your child's attempt directly under the correct spelling and ask them to underline the difference. "Beacuse" is two letters swapped. "Goverment" is one letter missing. "Seperate" is one letter wrong. Naming the error precisely is most of the repair, and it gives your child something small enough to remember overnight.

Then give the word a hook. A hook can be a smaller word hiding inside it, such as the "ear" in "hear" or the "rat" in "separate". It can be saying the word wrongly on purpose, so "Wednesday" is said with all three syllables while it is being written. It can be a group, so that "knee", "knife" and "knock" are learnt as one thing rather than three. The hook does not have to be clever. It has to be your child's own, which is why it is worth asking them for it rather than supplying it.

Now write each repaired word three times, spread out: once immediately, once after you have done the next word, and once at the very end of the session. Three spaced attempts beat ten in a row, even on a single evening, and especially on a single evening.

Re-test, then stop

Test the failed words again about fifteen minutes after you finished them, with the book closed. Two things can happen. If they are right, you are done: close the book and do something else, because further practice tonight will not add anything and will make tomorrow feel heavier. If a word is still wrong, do not grind it. Write it on a card, put the card on the breakfast table, and give it one attempt in the morning. A word that has failed twice in an evening is not going to be fixed by a third attempt at half past eight.

Keep the whole thing under half an hour. The purpose of tonight is to turn four wrong words into four right ones, not to revisit the week.

What the morning is for

Ten minutes before school, read out only the words that were wrong last night. Nothing else. Your child gets one attempt at each, and if one is still wrong you tell them the spelling plainly and move on. A test on the way out of the door is the last useful retrieval before the real one, and it is worth more than another evening session would have been.

If your child is anxious about the test itself, say plainly which words you are confident they have, and how many. Anxiety about spelling is almost always vague, and counting the words they can already do is the fastest way to make it specific and smaller.

Making tomorrow evening easier than tonight

The reason the night before is stressful is that the list arrived on Monday and nobody looked at it until Thursday. A short session on each of the days in between turns tonight into a formality, and it is the same total time or less.

This is the job Spelling Stars does on an ordinary weekday, so that the night before a test is quiet: you type the week's list once on Monday, or photograph the sheet the school sent home, and your child hears each word and spells it without ever seeing it written. Their score and the words they missed are waiting for you afterwards, which means Thursday's session starts from evidence rather than from a guess about what they can already do.

Keep the failed words from each test somewhere you can find them. Words that beat a child once tend to come back, and a short list of old misses, revisited a month later, is the cheapest revision there is.