Every parent knows the pattern: your child nails their Year 4 spellings on Friday, and by the next Friday half of them have evaporated. The words were never really learned — they were crammed, recalled once, and forgotten. The fix isn't more practice all at once. It's practising the right words at the right time, just as they're about to slip away.
That's exactly what spelling.live now does behind the scenes. This post explains how — and why our approach is a little different from the classic spaced-repetition algorithm you may have read about.
What is spaced repetition?
Spaced repetition is one of the most robustly evidence-backed ideas in learning. The principle is simple: instead of reviewing everything equally, you space out reviews over increasing intervals. A word you've just got wrong comes back tomorrow. A word you've reliably nailed three times running doesn't need to reappear for a couple of weeks. The harder a word is for your child specifically, the more often it resurfaces.
The best-known version is the SM-2 algorithm, which powers many flashcard apps. After each card, the learner grades how well they remembered it on a scale from 0 to 5, and the algorithm uses that grade to stretch or shrink the next interval.
Why we don't ask children to grade themselves
SM-2's 0-to-5 self-grading works well for motivated adults revising for an exam. It works badly for a seven-year-old practising because, castle, and separate. Asking a child "how well did you remember that, on a scale of 0 to 5?" interrupts the flow, and the answer is rarely reliable.
So spelling.live keeps the engine of spaced repetition but throws away the chore. We never ask your child to rate themselves. Instead, we infer how well a word is known from how they actually play — signals we're already capturing:
- Did they spell it correctly this time?
- Have they been getting it wrong recently?
- Has this word been a struggle for them before?
- How long is their current correct streak on it?
From those, each attempt is quietly graded as a strong, shaky, or failed recall, and the word's next review date is set accordingly. A word your child finds easy drifts further into the future each time they get it right. A word they trip over jumps straight back to tomorrow. All of it happens invisibly, whether they're playing a spelling game, doing a photo-marked paper practice, or taking a dictation test.
The short version: we use the proven scheduling maths of spaced repetition (ease factors and growing intervals), but we feed it with real gameplay instead of asking your child to self-grade. Tricky words come back often; mastered words rest — and your child never has to think about any of it.
How it fits the way your child already practises
Because the scheduler runs on ordinary practice, you don't need to do anything differently. When your child starts a session, spelling.live quietly moves their due and overdue words to the front of the queue, then fills the rest of the session with a healthy mix. Words they've truly mastered are rested — but if a long-mastered word hasn't been seen in weeks, it's nudged back in for a quick check so it doesn't quietly decay.
This pairs naturally with the lists you're already using:
- The National Curriculum statutory word lists for KS1 common exception words and the KS2 Year 3–6 lists.
- Your own custom lists from your child's school.
- Our year-group word lists: Year 1, Year 2, Year 3 & 4, and Year 5 & 6.
Whichever list a session draws from, the scheduler reorders it so the words that need attention surface first.
Does it work for both KS1 and KS2?
Yes. The same engine runs for a Year 1 child working through common exception words and a Year 6 child tackling accommodate and mischievous. Younger children tend to have more words "due" at once, so their sessions naturally focus on a smaller core until those words settle; older children, who often have larger lists, benefit from the algorithm quietly skipping the words they've already nailed so practice time goes where it counts.
What you'll notice as a parent
You won't see the algorithm — and that's the point. What you'll notice is that the words your child struggles with keep coming around until they genuinely stick, and the words they know stop wasting practice time. Over a few weeks, their progress reports should show accuracy climbing on exactly the words that used to trip them up.
Spelling that lasts isn't about doing more. It's about doing the right words, at the right moment — and now that happens automatically.