Spelling practice

Turn a school spelling list into practice your child can do alone, with the handwriting marked.

Spelling takes the list that comes home from school and turns it into practice your child can do largely on their own.

Setting a list up

A spelling list is a book in your library with its type set to Spelling list:

1. Import the school's sheet as a PDF or a photo in the Book Editor.
2. Set the type to Spelling list.
3. Run Scan spelling list (all pages) — or Scan spelling list for the page you are on. The words are pulled out and grouped into the sections the sheet uses.

There is no separate "spelling lists" screen; the list is the book, which is why it is edited in the same place as everything else.

Zen Reader calls the whole book a spelling set and each section inside it a list — usually one lesson, one week, or one test. Both pickers sit at the top of the Spelling screen, and everything below them follows what you have chosen.

What you land on

Open Spelling and Zen Reader chooses for you: the set assigned to that child whose test is due soonest, and inside it the list whose test is next. You can change either with the pickers.

Under Spelling setup (parents) a Family Manager or Parent assigns a list to a child and records its test date — that date is what decides the ordering above.

The screen then shows Your practice for this list — a tick for each practice done — the words as large chips, and a Next up nudge. The target is three each of Write practice, Say & repeat and Test.

Each chip carries the word, its pinyin and, where the list is not in the language of the app itself, its English. That is the quick way to check a scanned list came out right without stepping through the practice.

The ways to practise

Write practice. The words are shown; your child writes each one a set number of times (3, 5 or 10 — 5 to begin with), taps I'm done — take a photo, and photographs the sheet. Zen Reader marks each word and gives per-word cards: a face, correct or not quite, notes on the penmanship, which part of a character went wrong where that applies, and one suggestion. Anything it is unsure of is flagged for you.

Say & repeat. This one runs itself. Your child taps Start once; Zen Reader reads a word, listens, marks it and moves on. Done skips ahead as soon as they have said it, Hear it again repeats the word, and Pause stops the run. A near miss is not a failure — it keeps part of the credit rather than being retried.

Test. No peeking — the words are never shown. Each is read out with a writing pause you can lengthen or shorten, and Repeat, Previous and Next step through them. Then the sheet is photographed and marked. If your child already sat the test on paper at school, Already written this test somewhere else? → Add a photo instead skips straight to the photograph.

Two extra drills sit alongside them — Flip Fixers for the letters children reverse (b d p q g) and Number flips for the digits (3 5 6 9). See Flip Fixers.

Photographing a sheet

This is the part that decides whether the marking is any good.

• Leave a blank line between words. On squared paper the marking can otherwise read part of the word below. Zen Reader says so before your child starts writing.
• Flat paper, no folds, the whole sheet in frame.
• Even light, no shadow across the page and no glare.
• Straight on, not at an angle.
• Up to three photos before you tap Check it, if the work spreads over more than one sheet.

Take a photo, Use webcam and Import a photo are all offered, on every platform.

Edit opens the photo full screen, where you can zoom in and then Crop, Rotate (quarter turns, plus a slider for a small tilt), Perspective — drag the four corners onto the corners of the page to square up a photo taken at an angle — and Erase, to white out a stray line. Undo edits puts the original photo back, and what you save here is what gets marked. Download keeps a copy of the edited photo: on Windows and Mac it asks where to put it; on a phone or tablet it hands it to the usual share sheet, so you can save it to Files or Photos, or send it on.

If it is late and the photograph can wait, Finish now — add a photo later saves the run unmarked. It then appears under Photos to add on the Spelling screen and in the portfolio, showing as photo not added yet rather than counting as nought.

The two numbers on a result

A finished run carries two figures, and they are allowed to disagree:

• "7 of 10 words correct" — how many whole words were right.
• Overall mark — how close the whole sheet was, out of 100. A word can earn part of the credit, so a run can read "4 of 10 words correct" beside an overall mark of 47.

The faces are the same everywhere: 90% or more is great, 70% or more is good, and below 70% means keep practising. The ⓘ Key button on any report spells that out.

A run nothing has been able to check shows Not marked yet — never nought.

Checking the marking

Automatic marking of a child's handwriting is genuinely hard, and it is wrong sometimes.

Open the run's own report — from Session log in the Spelling portfolio, or straight after the practice — and any word the marker was unsure about carries three controls:

• Looks right — counts the word as correct.
• Not right — counts it as wrong.
• A box and Save mark — set any mark from 0 to 100 yourself.

Your decision replaces the machine's, immediately and everywhere: the run's headline, its overall mark, the portfolio totals and any PDF you share all move with it. The card then reads "A grown-up adjusted this mark" and the buttons go away.

Two limits worth knowing. Only words the marker flagged can be re-decided — a word it was confident about has no controls. And only a Family Manager or Parent may do it; the child cannot mark their own work.

Each word card also shows the child's own handwriting, clipped to that word. Tap it to look closely, Crop to reframe it, or Remove window if the frame caught the wrong thing. Where a run has several sheets, Previous photo and Next photo move between them.

A frame you set by hand is kept. Marking the sheet again will not move it back to where the machine thought the word was, and neither will undoing that marking.

Marking a run again

Analyse again marks the sheet afresh with the current version of the app. Marks can go down as well as up, and Zen Reader says so before it starts. Undo last analysis puts back the marking from before it — and you can undo that too.

Neither ever overwrites a mark you set or a crop window you framed yourself, and neither changes the number of words the run was out of.

Wrote on more than one page? adds a page to a run you have already saved. The new page is not marked straight away; Zen Reader offers Mark it now, or you can leave it and use Analyse again later.

If a mark is not just wrong but offensive or misleading, use Report this reply on it — that reaches us as a real support ticket, not a void.

Words your child already knows

A word that is long since mastered does not need practising every week. Skip this word on its chip takes it out of Write, Say & repeat and the Test for that child. A Reader taps Ask to skip this word instead, which shows as Skip requested — awaiting approval until an adult agrees. Skipped words lists them, and Include again brings one back.

Moving a run to the right child

If a practice was recorded on the wrong login, Reassign… on its report moves the whole run — photos, marks and all — to another child in the family. Family Managers and Parents only.

Seeing how it is going

Everything is kept. See Progress and portfolios for the picture across lists, the per-word mastery list, and the individual session reports.