We spend a lot of time watching real families use spelling.live — and the best improvements almost always come from small moments of friction we notice when a child sits down to practise. This week was a flurry of exactly that kind of polish: nothing that needs a tutorial, just a handful of changes that make a practice session smoother from the first tap. Here's what landed.
Your lists, ready when you are
The most common snag we kept seeing: a parent carefully adds this week's spelling list, hands the tablet over — and the app is sitting on "All Lists" instead of the one they just made. So the child practises a hundred mixed words rather than the ten that matter on Friday.
That's fixed. spelling.live now pre-selects the list you most recently added or used. Open practice and you land on the right words straight away. "All Lists" is still one tap away if you want the full mix, and if you deliberately choose it, that choice now sticks.
The very same logic now drives the Dictation test set-up, which used to default to "All words" too. Wherever you pick a list, spelling.live remembers.
Build this week's list from a single idea
Here's the part that saves the most typing: you don't have to enter the words at all. In Create a list → "Get words on any topic", type something like space, the seaside or Year 4 homophones — or just tap one of the example chips — and spelling.live writes you an age-appropriate, UK-English practice list in a couple of seconds.
You then get the normal review screen: glance over the suggestions, drop any you don't fancy, and save. It's child-safe and written in UK English, and identical topics are remembered, so trying the same idea again is instant. It's the fastest way we've found to turn "this week we're doing the Romans" into ten words ready to practise — and, thanks to the change above, that new list is the one waiting for your child next time.
Practice that fits the screen
Children turn tablets and phones sideways — especially the younger ones leaning over a screen to write. But our "Write it" handwriting pad was built for portrait, so in landscape the writing box ballooned, the page scrolled around under little hands, and the "Check it" button slid off the bottom of the screen.
We've reworked landscape "Write it" so the pad sizes itself to the space, the page stops sliding about, and the "Check it" button stays pinned and visible. Alongside it, two small defaults changed based on how families actually use the app:
- Word navigation arrows are now on by default, so you can skip between words without diving into settings.
- The "Back to menu" button now shows for younger children too (it used to be hidden in the early-years view), with a new toggle if you'd rather keep it out of reach.
Faster handwriting checks — instant on the device, accurate in the cloud
When a child writes a word and taps "Check it", spelling.live now reads it on the device first, before any network request — so the ✓ usually appears the instant they lift their finger. How that first read happens depends on where you're using the app:
- In the iOS and Android apps, recognition runs through on-device digital-ink models — Apple's Vision framework on iPhone and iPad, Google's ML Kit on Android — so for that quick check, nothing your child wrote needs to leave the device.
- In a web browser, it uses the built-in Handwriting Recognition API where the browser supports it.
In every case we tell the recogniser which word to expect, so it's a focused "did they write this word?" check rather than open guesswork — which makes it both faster and more accurate.
And there's always a safety net. If the on-device read isn't available, isn't sure, or you're offline, spelling.live falls back to its cloud handwriting check — the same GPT-4o vision read it has always used — as the authoritative answer. You get the speed of on-device with the reliability of the cloud behind it.
One related tweak: for new profiles, the deeper cloud-based handwriting analysis (the letter-by-letter formation report) now starts switched off, so a straightforward "is this spelled correctly?" check stays quick and costs no credit. Families who want the full writing report can switch it on per child in settings, exactly as before — and nothing changes for children who already had it enabled.
The word we accidentally banned
Now the honest one. Because this is a children's app, every word you add to a list passes a safety check before it's saved. That guard is important — and it turned out to be too zealous.
We lean on an automated moderation model as one layer of that check, and we'd wired it to block a word if the model flagged it at all. The problem: that top-level flag bundles in a "violence" signal that fires on perfectly ordinary, context-free vocabulary. Scored as a bare word with no sentence around it, everyday spelling words tripped it — including a whole family of innocent -ck words. A parent trying to save kick, sock or peck would be told their list contained something unsuitable, with no clue which word, and no way forward.
We tightened it. The moderation layer now only blocks on the categories that genuinely don't belong in a child's spelling list — sexual content, hate and harassment — and ignores the over-eager violence flag on bare words. Real profanity and slurs are still caught, the way they always were, by a precise built-in list. And if a word is ever blocked, the message now names the exact word so you can fix your list in seconds instead of guessing.
It's a good reminder of how we try to build for children: take safety seriously, but keep checking that "safe" hasn't quietly become "frustrating".
The bigger picture, too
This week's polish sits on top of some larger features from the past fortnight. If you missed them, they're worth a look:
- The Skills Check — a feature-based spelling inventory that finds which patterns to practise, not just a score.
- Spaced repetition — your child's trickiest words come back at just the right moment, no flashcard grind.
- Paper practice — photograph the marked Friday test and watch it update the progress report.
- Handwriting analysis — instant feedback on how letters are formed, not just whether the spelling's right.
- How we look after children's data — what we collect, what we don't, and the controls you have.
As always, these landed because real families showed us where the rough edges were. If something in spelling.live trips you up — even a single word that shouldn't have been blocked — tell us. That's how the next round of polish gets written.