Flip Fixers

A short drill for the letters and digits children write back to front — b d p q g, 3 5 6 9.

Young children reverse letters. b and d are the classic pair, then p, q and g, and the same happens with the digits 3, 5, 6 and 9. Flip Fixers is a few minutes of focused practice on exactly those shapes.

This is an English drill. Reversal is a property of the Latin alphabet, so the buttons do not appear on a Chinese list.

Where to find it

Open Spelling, choose an English spelling list that has words in it, and two buttons sit alongside the usual practice modes:

• Flip Fixers - b d p q g
• Number flips - 3 5 6 9

What a round is like

Your child is shown a shape and asked to pick it out — "Which one is b?" — or to finish a word with the right letter, using a bank of ordinary words like bed, dog, pig, quiz and gap. A drill is eight rounds, and ends with a simple "You got 6 of 8" and Practise again.

The part worth doing with your child is Say it while you write it: each shape comes with a way of forming it and a phrase to say. The two-fists trick for b and d — make two thumbs-up fists and they spell b-e-d, so the left hand is b — is the one most children remember.

Nothing is saved

The screen says so, and means it: this is just practice, nothing here is saved or marked. It does not appear in any portfolio, it does not affect a score, and it works offline. That is deliberate — a child should be able to get these wrong as many times as it takes.

Knowing which ones to practise

The drill itself always starts on b and d (or 3 and 5). To find out which shapes your child is actually reversing, look at the Spelling portfolio, which has a Letter and number flips section built from their own marked handwriting, naming the ones worth practising.