This Week's Words
A fresh, level-appropriate list every week, drawn from the DfE English Appendix 1 statutory word lists (Years 1–6) plus an 11+ stretch set. Each word is met before it's tested.
Step 1 · Meet the word
Before any test, your child meets the word: its part of speech, a child-friendly definition, an example sentence, and a 🔊 Listen button that only reads it aloud on tap — never automatically.
Meet the word
because
🔊 Listenconjunction
Used to give the reason for something.
“I was happy because it was my birthday.”
Step 2 · Test it in a sentence
Then a cloze question blanks the word inside its own sentence. Options are the correct spelling plus three authored plausible misspellings — never real words.
Spelling · Year 3/4 statutory list
I was late ___ the bus did not come.
Which spelling completes the sentence?
- because
- becuase
- becouse
- becaus
Yes! Well spotted.
"Because" — a Year 3/4 statutory word from the DfE spelling list.
Tap to continue →
Real words, straight from the DfE lists
- Real statutory words used across the app: because, different, favourite, believe, special, island, actually — plus the full Years 1–6 statutory lists and an 11+ stretch set.
- Every word carries its part of speech, definition, three distractors, National Curriculum objective, year group, spelling-pattern tag and an example sentence.
How the difficulty adapts
This Week's Words, tuned week by week
Spelling has its own rating, one of the four skills that make up Word Time, so weekly lists step up at exactly the pace your child is ready for.
Its own rating within English
Spelling is one of English's four tracked skills (comprehension, SPaG, vocabulary, spelling), each with its own live rating — so a confident speller with wobblier grammar shows up accurately rather than as one blended English score.
Year-anchored word lists
Weekly lists step through the DfE English Appendix 1 statutory word lists, Years 1 to 6, plus an 11+ stretch set — following the same roughly 250-rating-points-per-year pace as every other subject.
Rolls into the parent score
Spelling's rating rolls into English's overall standing on the 55–145 standardised-style score on the parent dashboard, centred on 100 like an 11+ standardised score.
Stretched, not overwhelmed
Practice cycles through spelling patterns — homophones, suffixes, tricky exception words and more — so no single pattern gets over-drilled while another goes untouched.
Words come back to check they've stuck
A word tested and got right this week — say, "because" — doesn't just disappear. It quietly resurfaces a few weeks later on its own spaced schedule, the same spaced-retrieval approach used across the app.
The same five-stage scale every subject's trail runs on — Spelling's rating moves along it as your child answers.
The rating a typical child is expected to be secure at, by the end of each school year — about 250 points per year.