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.
Put "disappointment" in front of a Year 5 child and watch what happens. Fourteen letters, viewed as one long unbroken thing, and every attempt is a memory test of the whole string at once. Miss anywhere and the whole word is "wrong."
Now show them the same word as dis + appoint + ment. Suddenly there are three small pieces, each of which they can probably already spell - and the long word stops being long. That is the entire idea behind Word Parts, the morphology activity in Spelling.Live, and it's how the National Curriculum expects upper-KS2 spelling to be taught: not letter by letter, but by prefixes, bases and suffixes, and the small rules that fire where they join.
How a round works
Word Parts takes words from your child's own spelling list - the ones with real structure in them - and hands over the pieces. The child assembles the word from its parts: endings first, building outwards from the base, so the word grows the way words actually grow ("happy" becomes "happiness" becomes "unhappiness").
Then comes the part we're proudest of. When the pieces go together naively, they often spell the word wrong: fancy + ful runs together as "fancyful". The app shows exactly that - the honest, naive join - and asks the child to find what's wrong with it. They tap the y, it becomes an i, and only then is the rule named: change the y to an i when you add the ending. The same single mechanic covers every kind of join English throws at them:
- excite + ment shows "excitement"... almost - tap the
ethat has to go in "excite + ing". - act + tion runs together as "acttion" - tap the doubled letter.
- celebrate + ation gives "celebrateation" - tap the three letters that drop.
The child does the spelling change rather than being shown it. That distinction came straight out of our play-testing: an earlier version displayed the corrected word with the changed letters highlighted, and the feedback was blunt - "you just click on the endings and it works." Being shown the answer and finding the answer look identical on screen for a moment, but only one of them teaches. Now the finding is the game.
Every split is checked by a person
There is no AI guessing where a word divides. Every decomposition in Word Parts comes from a hand-checked inventory built around the statutory word lists and the National Curriculum's own example words - because a wrong split asserted confidently to a child ("animal = anime + al" is the kind of thing automatic splitting produces) is worse than no split at all. The corrected spelling the child builds towards is always their actual target word, reconstructed piece by piece - no step of a round can ever show letters that aren't part of the real word.
Most school spelling lists, it turns out, contain fewer buildable words than you'd guess - a week of "i before e" words has no prefixes or suffixes in it at all. So a round tops itself up from a curated starter set of genuinely buildable words, clearly labelled as a bonus word - not from your list, so your child always gets a full round and you always know which words were theirs.
Why it counts - when games don't
Spelling.Live has a long-standing rule: games are for fun, and they never feed the accuracy report. Popping the right balloon under time pressure is recognition; the progress report measures recall. Word Parts is the one deliberate exception, and the reasoning is worth spelling out: assembling their own target word from its parts, with no timer and no decoys, is real spelling production - closer to writing the word than to spotting it. So Word Parts results count towards the progress report and feed the revision scheduler, and the app verifies server-side that a counted word really came from your child's own assigned list before it counts (a bonus starter word is play, not evidence). It also earns Coins - at half the rate of typing a word cold, because building from given pieces is deliberately easier than producing from memory, and the reward should say so.
At the end of a round, each word comes back one at a time with its word family - tap "fancy" and see fanciful, fancied, fancier - so the pieces they just handled connect outwards to words they'll meet next.
Where to find it
Word Parts is free for every child, on both age bands, from the activities on the home screen and as a schedulable activity in the weekly Learning plan - a Tuesday of building the week's words from their pieces slots neatly between meeting the words and testing them. Tongo walks every child through their first round.
It also pairs with the rest of what shipped this season: when a child gets one of these long words wrong in ordinary practice, the new aid ladder steps in with exactly the tricky letters - often the very join Word Parts taught - and Word Meanings makes sure they know what the word they're building actually means. Long words stop being long when you know what they're made of. That's the whole trick, and now it's an activity.