Spelling practice that does not need a second adult
A spelling test is easy to give and hard to practise. Giving it needs one adult reading twenty words to a room; practising it needs one adult per child, reading the same words at home. Most families do not have that adult free at seven in the evening, and most classrooms do not have one free during independent work. The two tools on this page put the reading-aloud in the browser, so a student can practise the list alone, hear each word as many times as they need, and find out immediately whether they spelled it correctly.
They were two separate pages and are now one. The spelling test maker is for your own list: this week's words from the scheme, the vocabulary from a topic, or the words a particular student keeps missing. The spelling bee practice tool is for when you want a ready-made list at a grade level, with definitions and sentences, in the format of a bee. A natural pattern is the first every week and the second during bee preparation.
Setting up the weekly test
Type or paste the words, one per line. Ten to twenty is the usual range; the tool takes up to a hundred. Choose a speed. Slow (0.6x) suits kindergarten to second grade and students learning English; normal (1x) suits most classes; fast (1.4x) is for confident spellers. Start the test and the first word is spoken. The student types it and presses enter; in practice mode the tool marks it, shows the correct spelling if it was wrong, and moves on. A 'say again' button replays the word without penalty, because hearing a word three times is practice, not cheating.
At the end, the score and the list of missed words appear. The most useful thing to do with that list is to run it again as its own test, which is one click. For the paper test on Friday, the print button produces a numbered, lined sheet with name, class and date at the top and no words on it, plus an optional answer-key page. Print one per student and read the list yourself, or let the tool read it through the classroom speakers while you walk the room.
Spelling bee rounds by grade
The spelling bee tool holds 240 words across grades one to eight, thirty per grade, with no word repeated between grades. Pick a grade and a round of ten, twenty or the whole list. For each word the student hears it spoken and can ask for its definition, its part of speech or a sentence, as a speller may ask the pronouncer in a real bee. They type the spelling, get an immediate result, and at the end see their score and the words they missed, which can be practised again straight away.
Rounds are drawn at random without repeating a word until the whole grade has come up, so three rounds of ten cover a grade before it reshuffles. A student preparing for a bee should work a grade above their own once the current grade is consistently correct. There is also a classroom bee mode: put it on the projector, the tool says each word, spellers answer aloud and you mark them right or wrong, with players out after one to three strikes.
Using the tools with different learners
For students with dyslexia or a reading difficulty, the audio-first design can help: the word is not shown until it has been typed, so the practice is purely sound-to-spelling, and the slow speed with unlimited replays removes the time pressure. For English learners, the definition and sentence in the bee tool give the meaning alongside the spelling, which is how vocabulary sticks. For early years, keep lists short, use the slow speed, and celebrate the score rather than the misses. The tools do not record voices or store answers, so a student can make mistakes in private.
One limit to know about: the voice comes from the browser and the device. Current versions of Chrome, Edge and Safari usually have a clear English voice, and you can pick from the English voices the device offers. On some older tablets and school-locked devices the voice can be missing or robotic; if a word is unclear, the 'say again' button and the definition usually resolve it, and a teacher can always read the word aloud instead.
Beyond the test
Spelling is one part of a vocabulary routine. The same site has a word of the day with a daily quiz, a cloze generator that turns any passage into a fill-in-the-blank exercise, and an AI quiz maker that builds a vocabulary quiz from a text or a topic and shares it with a link. The spelling tools stay free and need no account.