Spelling practice for children with dyslexia and SEND

Spelling is often the hardest part of school for a child with dyslexia or other special educational needs. The weekly list arrives, the test comes round, and the same words are wrong again. More testing doesn't fix that. Calm, repeated, well-supported practice does.

Spelling.Live isn't a dyslexia intervention programme and doesn't diagnose anything. It is a spelling practice app with the adjustments many children need built in, and set per child, so one sibling's settings never change another's.

Built by a dyslexic parent

Spelling.Live's founder, Manoj Shah, grew up in Kenya struggling with spelling and wasn't diagnosed with dyslexia until university. He built the app for his own children - including his daughter Kaya, who has Down syndrome and has used it since the first build. The settings below aren't a checklist added later; most of them exist because a real child needed them. Read our story.

Reading and visual settings

• Reading font - Standard, a clearer font, or OpenDyslexic, applied to every word and sentence in practice.
• Text size - Normal, Large or Extra large.
• Letter and line spacing - Relaxed or Roomy spacing to reduce crowding.
• Colour overlays - cream, blue, mint, rose or grey tints.
• Slower speech - words and sentences can be read aloud at a slower pace, always in a British voice.

Help that arrives one step at a time

When a child gets a word wrong, they are not just shown a red cross. Spelling.Live's Aid Ladder brings help in gradually: another look at the word, then the tricky part highlighted and explained, then key letters, so the child still does the spelling themselves. Every word is read aloud, and words that sound alike (wait and weight) are always read in a sentence so a child is never guessing which one we meant.

The app also names the pattern behind each mistake - a sound spelled a different way, a missing double letter, a suffix rule - so parents and teachers can see what to work on, not just a score.

Handwriting that is judged kindly

• Write, don't just type. Children can write each word with a finger or stylus, or on paper and have it marked from a photo - the way they will be tested at school.
• How strictly handwriting is read - Strict, Standard or Forgiving. Forgiving gives the benefit of the doubt to letters that look alike (a u that looks like a v) without ever accepting a genuine misspelling.
• Gentler feedback - kinder messages when handwriting is checked.
• "I wrote it right" button - if we misread what a child wrote, they can say so, and a misread never counts against them.

No pressure where it doesn't help

• No timers in spelling practice, and leaderboards stay off unless a parent opts in.
• A calm games setting hides streaks, leaderboards and countdown timers in the bonus games.
• Screen-reader friendly games for children who use assistive technology.
• Short daily sessions, with missed words brought back automatically on a spaced schedule.

For SENCOs and schools

Spelling.Live works for small-group spelling interventions as well as whole classes. Each pupil keeps their own support settings, practises their own list, and every answer feeds a report showing which spelling patterns are still causing trouble. Pupils sign in with a printed label - no email addresses needed.

Read how schools use it for interventions, see our accessibility statement, or pilot it free with one class.