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.
Watch a good tutor sitting next to a child who has just spelled "because" wrong, and you'll notice what they don't do. They don't announce the correct spelling and move on. They don't repeat the same "try again" three times either. They give a little help - the smallest nudge that might unlock it - and if that's not enough, a slightly bigger one, and then a bigger one still. The child keeps trying the same word the whole time, and each attempt has a better chance than the last.
Until now, Spelling.Live behaved like neither of those things. In Type it, a wrong answer showed the correct spelling and offered "Next word" - a dead end dressed as feedback. In Write it, the child got a second go at the canvas, but with no more help than the first. We've replaced both with what we call the aid ladder: when a word goes wrong in practice, help arrives one step at a time, and the child retries the same word after every step.
The ladder, rung by rung
Every word starts the same way: a clean first attempt, no aids, nothing pre-filled. That first try matters - it's the honest measure of what your child can do unaided, and nothing the ladder does afterwards touches it.
Get the word wrong, and the first rung of help appears. Get it wrong again, and the next one arrives on top. By default:
- See it again. The word flashes up briefly - the classic look, cover, write - then the input clears and they try again, with the word read aloud once more.
- The tricky part, revealed. The second wrong answer brings something more surgical: only the letters they actually got wrong, shown in their places -
_ _ _ i e _ _for a child who wrote "acheive". This isn't a canned hint. The app compares what they just wrote against the target, letter by letter, and reveals exactly the span they slipped on - never more than half the word, because key letters are a clue, not the answer. - Almost there. On the third wrong answer, Type it locks the first half of the word into place so they finish it; Write it shows the whole word to copy - because at that point, carefully copying the correct spelling is worth more than a fourth blind guess.
And alongside that last rung, a quiet Skip button appears: "Tricky one! We'll come back to it another day." No red screen, no lost coins - the word is shown once, marked as one to work on, and the spaced-repetition scheduler makes sure it comes back soon. A stuck child is never trapped, and never shamed.
Or let Tongo do the coaching
Flashing the word suits many children - especially younger ones meeting a word for the first time, where seeing it again is exactly the point. But some children should keep spelling from memory, and for them there's a second style: Coach it.
In Coach it, the word is never flashed at any rung. Instead, on the first wrong answer, Tongo - the monkey who's already on screen cheering them along - speaks up in his own speech bubble, with a tip about the actual mistake they just made. Not a generic "check your spelling," but the named rule behind their error, from the same mistake classifier that powers the parent Patterns report: the child who wrote "acheive" hears about i-before-e; the child who wrote "runing" hears about doubling the consonant. Then they try again, from memory. The targeted rungs (tricky letters, then the heavier help) follow only if they're still needed - and the full word appears only when the word is finished with, never mid-attempt.
The tip is instant and built in - no waiting on a server, no AI credits spent mid-word. The diagnosis your child hears in the moment is the same one you'll see on the Patterns report later, so the app never tells the two of you different stories about the same mistake.
Tuned per child - and per activity
Open your child's settings and you'll find Help when stuck with two simple levers:
- Help style: 🔦 Show the word (flash-led - the default), 🐵 Coach it (Tongo's tip, no flash), or off entirely if you want the old behaviour.
- Pace: Step in quickly, Standard, or Let them wrestle. Pace changes when help arrives and when the exits open - it never changes what the help is. "Let them wrestle" holds every aid back one extra try and allows an extra attempt before Skip appears; "Step in quickly" opens the exits sooner for a child who finds repeated failure discouraging.
The Learning plan goes one level deeper: any Type it or Write it activity's ⚙ settings can override the style for just that session - flash-led on Monday when the words are new, coach-led by Thursday when they shouldn't need to see them any more. That progression - from seeing the word to being coached on it to spelling it cold - is exactly how the week is supposed to tighten.
One important boundary: tests never get the ladder. A Skills Check, a plan activity running under test conditions, a classic test - all keep their strict, limited-attempt rules. The ladder is for practice, where the goal is learning; a test's job is to measure, and measuring means no rungs.
Why your progress report stays honest
Here's the part we sweated over, because it would have been easy to get quietly wrong.
A child who spells "because" correctly after a flash and a tricky-letters reveal has done something real - but it is not the same thing as spelling it correctly cold, and your child's records shouldn't pretend otherwise. So every word the ladder helped with is recorded as correct with help, with the exact aids that were shown stored alongside it. The child gets the full celebration on screen - the honesty lives in the data, not the confetti. The progress report, the revision scheduler and the mastery tracking all read that record, which means a word isn't quietly marked "sorted" just because the third rung finally carried them over the line. It comes back until they can do it without the ladder.
That's also why the first attempt always stays clean, and why Skip records the word as one to revisit rather than making it disappear. The ladder changes how it feels to get a word wrong. It never changes what the app knows.
The bigger picture
The aid ladder is one piece of a broader idea we keep coming back to: the moment a child gets something wrong is the most valuable teaching moment in the whole app, and it deserves more than a red cross and the right answer. It joins the named spelling patterns behind every mistake, the Word Parts activity that makes long words buildable, and Word Meanings, which makes sure the words being spelled are actually understood.
It's live now for every family, on by default in its gentlest form, and entirely yours to tune. Watch what your child does on the second rung - the one where only their own tricky letters appear. That little "oh!" is the whole feature.