About Spelling.Live

Spelling.Live turns the spelling list your child's school sends home into short, daily practice - and shows you exactly which spelling patterns are still catching them out. It is made in the UK, in British English, for primary-age children and the adults who help them.

Our story

Spelling.Live was built by Manoj Shah. He grew up in Kenya and was, in his own words, really poor at spelling - the red pen on every page, the same words wrong week after week, and nobody quite able to say why. It wasn't until university that he got a proper diagnosis: dyslexia.

Years later the spelling lists started coming home again, this time in his children's bags. His daughter Kaya has Down syndrome, a moderate learning disability and difficulties with mobility. His son Aarav always passed the Friday test - and then got the same words wrong a few weeks later. Two very different children, and no app that worked for both of them.

There was a more awkward discovery too. Sitting down on a Sunday evening to mark Aarav's list - embarrassment, conscience, insistent - Manoj realised he wasn't a reliable marker. A tired adult's eye skims, a word looks roughly right, and it gets a tick. But a wrong tick isn't small: the word leaves the practice list and never comes back, and the child finds out in the test. So he built an app that does the marking, and that shows the pattern behind the mistakes rather than just a score.

By day Manoj is an Enterprise Solution Architect, with a background at EY and Defra. Spelling.Live is what he builds in the evenings, for his own two children. Read his story on Medium or connect on LinkedIn.

Kaya: built around her, not adapted for her afterwards

Kaya has used Spelling.Live since the very first build, and many of its features exist because of her. She is a strongly visual learner and asks for the picture before anything else, so every word can start with a picture clue and no mode has to come before another - on a hard day she does Pick it and stops, and nothing treats that as failure. Flash shows a word for a few seconds and then hides it, giving it back just long enough to write, and the time can be shortened as the word becomes familiar. A trace overlay, a slower voice and a shorter keyboard are each the difference between a task she can try and one she can't.

When the app marked one of her dictation pages, the score (2 out of 5) mattered less than what she actually wrote: rock for sock, lock for back. The endings were secure; the first letter was the problem. That is something a parent or teacher can act on.

"I did it!!" - unprompted, from the next room. That is the reason any of this exists.

Aarav: passing the test isn't the same as knowing the word

Aarav did well whenever he knew which words were coming. What changed things was spaced repetition - missed words coming back weeks after the test - and meeting each word in more than one way: typing it, saying it, writing it, and in games built from his own list.

When he wrote insistant for insistent, the app didn't just mark it wrong; it named the rule (-ent and -ant sound the same, so the wrong one is easy to pick). A fifteen-second conversation instead of a re-test.

He also taught us something the data can't see. One week he scored well, but had quietly coloured in the words he wasn't sure about - the ones he'd guessed correctly. A tick can hide a guess. That's why the report is built to start a conversation with your child, not replace one, and why missed and shaky words keep coming back. Read more in his paper test and his spelling log book.

What that taught us

The research on spelling says what Kaya and Aarav showed at home: words are learned when they are taught, revisited over time and practised the way children are actually tested - not when they are simply tested again. So the app starts from the list that really came home (typed in, or photographed), brings missed words back just as they start to fade, and lets children practise in four ways - choosing, typing, saying and writing by hand - because school spelling tests are still written on paper.

Spelling.Live isn't a specialist SEN product. But the support Kaya needed - pictures first, Flash, tracing, slower audio, gentler feedback - is there for every child, and it's why the app has a full set of dyslexia and SEND settings.

What makes it different

• Your school's own list, or the National Curriculum lists, Reception to Year 6.
• Handwriting checked by AI, on screen or on paper from a photo.
• Every mistake diagnosed - the app names the spelling rule behind it.
• Help one step at a time rather than the answer handed over.
• Built for every child, with dyslexia and SEND settings per child.

See the full feature list or how it works.

Safe by design

Spelling.Live is built for children, so it is built to the UK Children's Code: we never sell data, leaderboards stay off unless a parent opts in, our database is hosted in the EU, and parents can export or delete their account themselves at any time. We publish exactly which AI services we use and what they receive on our AI transparency page, and our privacy policy is written to be read.

Recognition and partners

Spelling.Live is certified by the Educational App Store with a 5.0 / 5 rating (read the review), and works with Education Beyond as its founding educational partner. It is available on the web, the App Store and Google Play, and is listed on the Google Workspace Marketplace so schools can import their Google Classroom classes.

Contact

We read every message. Email support@spelling.live or visit support, or follow us on X (@spellinglive), and watch short how-to videos on our YouTube playlist. Schools can pilot it free with one class, and tutors can claim a tutor account.