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.
This is the biggest update we've shipped since launch. The headline is the new Learning plan - a ready-made weekly structure for practice that you can edit down to the individual activity - but there's a long tail of smaller improvements underneath it, many of them straight from things families reported. Here's the tour.
A weekly Learning plan, built for you
Until now, Spelling.Live gave you the ingredients - lists, practice modes, games - and left the weekly routine up to you. The Learning plan puts a sensible default in place from day one.
Every child's plan starts from one of three templates:
- Simple Week - the default. The same short practice (Type it, six core words plus two due for revision) on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, then a paper test on Friday covering everything.
- Classic Week - a different activity each day: meet the words on Monday, full recall on Tuesday, a flash-first dictation midweek, a crossword built from the words' meanings, then the Friday test.
- Paper-First Week - for families who prefer real paper: written practice photographed in twice a week, one screen-based crossword to break it up, and the same Friday test.
From there it's yours to shape. Open Learning plan on your child's card and you can add, remove or reorder activities on any day, and tap the ⚙ on any activity to change word counts, typing aids (letter tiles or a first-letter head start), writing guides, which extras show with each word, or whether it runs under test conditions - no hints, just like the real thing. Children now get told when that happens, too ("This one's a test - no hints, you've got this") instead of wondering where their hint buttons went.
Your child, meanwhile, sees none of that machinery - just a Today's practice card with one clear thing to do, a friendly week strip showing what's done, and games that unlock when today's practice is finished.
Two safety valves worth knowing about: Adjust today lets you lighten a day, push it to tomorrow, or unlock games early when life happens; and the plan's decision log shows, in plain English, anything the app decided on your behalf - so it's never a black box. The full guide is at help/learning-plan.
Word suggestions that start from your child
The new Suggest from progress option (look for the 🧠 on the Add spellings screen) builds a practice list from your child's own history: words genuinely due for revision come first, topped up with fresh words targeting their most common misspelling pattern. It saves as a normal list you can review and edit - the AI proposes, you decide.
This sits on top of the same spaced-repetition ordering that now quietly runs through practice, dictation tests and the plan - words your child finds hard come back sooner, mastered ones drop back. That's now documented properly in Progress tracking.
Smaller things you asked for
- My Challenges - when you share a game challenge, you can now see who's played it and re-share the link straight from the card, all under the Games section.
- A real name, not "Me" - setting up a profile for yourself no longer labels you "Me", and you can now edit any child's name and pronoun (he / she / they) from their settings page.
- Flash word, mode by mode - the quick look-cover-write reveal can now be allowed or switched off separately for Multiple choice, Type it and Write it, so it can be a warm-up aid without being available in the modes where your child should be answering cold.
- Slow connections behave - tapping "hear the word" repeatedly no longer queues up a burst of overlapping audio, the writing pad waits until the word is actually ready, and the next word's audio pre-loads so it plays instantly.
- Small phones - the practice-mode buttons no longer cramp into an unreadable row when four modes are showing.
- Stale tabs heal themselves - if the app updated while a tab was open, buttons could silently do nothing; the app now refreshes itself once instead.
Under the hood
Less visible, but worth recording: every AI feature now counts credits consistently (including a few that previously didn't), anonymous traffic is rate-limited so the credit system stays fair, our child-safety guardrail is now applied to every piece of AI-generated text a child reads - including coach tips and handwriting feedback - and our data-retention windows are now enforced automatically, exactly as our privacy policy describes. New database indexes keep reports fast as your child's history grows.
As always, the help centre has the detail, and the feedback button in the app comes straight to us - a lot of this month's list started life as a parent's screenshot.