Drafted with AI assistance and reviewed, fact-checked and edited by hand before publishing - see our AI transparency page for how we use AI across the app.
The Write it pad is where Spelling.Live comes closest to a real spelling test - your child hears the word and writes it by hand, exactly as they would in class. This update makes that pad calmer, bigger, and much more faithful to how handwriting is actually taught in UK schools. It also seems a good moment to explain properly how our handwriting checking works, because it's quite different from most spelling apps - and it's the reason the native iPhone, iPad and Android apps feel so fast.
Genuine joined-up cursive tracing - not a fancy display font
You can now switch the letter trace on the writing pad to Cursive (joined-up). It draws the whole word as one faint, connected piece of writing for your child to trace over - with real lead-in and lead-out strokes, the letters joined the way a UK teacher would join them.
Getting this right took more care than you might expect, and the font choice matters enormously. Most "cursive" fonts are decorative scripts - wedding-invitation calligraphy, or a casual American hand - and tracing over one of those teaches a child letterforms no UK school would recognise. Instead we use Playwrite England Joined, from Google Fonts' Playwrite project: a collection of primary-school handwriting fonts built country by country, each one modelled on the handwriting style actually taught in that country's classrooms. The England variants encode the continuous-cursive model used in English schools - entry strokes from the line, exit flicks, and joins in the places children are taught to make them.
The print trace uses the same family's Playwrite England SemiJoined - the printed-letters-with-exit-flicks style English children learn first, as the stepping stone to joining. So whether your child is at the block-letters stage or the joined-up stage, the letters they trace are the letters their teacher draws on the board, and both come from one consistent, purpose-built library rather than whatever font looked nice.
Cursive tracing is available for both levels - early years and fluent - because plenty of Year 3-6 children are still cementing their joins. For fluent children there's a simple "Cursive letter trace to copy" switch in the in-game Parents panel.
A calmer, bigger writing pad
A few smaller changes add up on this screen:
- One writing line, not four. The old cluster of ruled guide lines never quite lined up with the traced letters and read as clutter. There's now a single dashed writing line the letters sit on.
- The trace actually fills the pad. Rather than guessing at a font size, the app now measures the real drawn shape of the word and scales it to use the pad's height, so the model letters are big enough to genuinely trace, not squint at.
- An eraser. Next to Clear there's now an eraser toggle, so one wobbly letter can be rubbed out with a finger or mouse without wiping the whole word. (A stylus with a built-in eraser always worked - now everyone has one.)
- Less noise. The lowercase reminder is a single friendly line showing the shape of lowercase letters (young children may not know the word "lowercase", but they recognise a b c), and the numbered letter boxes below the pad step aside for long words where they'd become unreadable slivers.
How the handwriting check really works - and why the native apps feel instant
Here's the part we think sets Spelling.Live apart, and it's worth being precise about.
Many spelling apps "check" handwriting by template-matching: did the pen stay roughly inside a stencilled letter shape? That approach can only ever confirm tracing - it cannot read free writing, it falls apart on joined-up handwriting, and it never has to answer the question that matters in a spelling test: what word did the child actually write?
Spelling.Live answers exactly that question, in two stages:
- An instant on-device read. On the native iPhone/iPad and Android apps, your child's pen strokes are first read on the device itself - Apple's Vision handwriting recognition on iOS, Google's ML Kit digital-ink recognition on Android. This takes about a tenth of a second. If it confidently reads exactly the right spelling, your child gets their tick instantly - no waiting, no internet round-trip, and no AI credit spent.
- An AI teacher's eye for everything else. If the quick read isn't sure - and joined-up or enthusiastic six-year-old writing often defeats conventional recognisers - the attempt goes to a frontier vision model that reads the page the way a teacher would, letter by letter, and returns both a verdict and constructive feedback on letter formation. Crucially, a child is never marked wrong by the quick pass alone: anything short of a confident "correct" gets the careful second look.
One more design decision we're strict about: we never tell the recogniser what word we're expecting. Priming a recogniser with the target word is autocorrect by another name - it nudges a near-miss into being read as the right answer, which quietly marks misspellings correct. Our recognisers read what your child actually wrote, cold. In a spelling app, that honesty is the whole point.
The result is the best of both worlds: neat, correct writing is rewarded instantly (and works even with a patchy connection), while messy, joined, or unusual writing gets the patient, intelligent reading it deserves rather than a shrug. The web app uses the same careful AI read for every check - the on-device fast path is one more reason the native apps are worth installing on the device your child practises on.
Where to find it all
The trace styles live in the in-game Parents panel: Print letters on a line, Bubble outline + dash, and the new Cursive (joined-up). Everything follows your child between devices, and none of it changes how answers are marked - tracing is a scaffold you can fade out whenever they're ready to write cold.
As ever, this update came straight from watching real children use the pad. If something about the writing experience doesn't feel right for your child, the 💬 feedback button goes straight to us.