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.

At the start of each term a parent sees a banner — New term? Add this term's spelling and word lists — asking for the lists the teacher sent home. It is for families with Chinese books (the school dictation sheet is a Chinese-homework habit), and only Family Managers and Parents see it; a child is never asked.

• With term dates — Singapore's MOE school terms, or the School term start dates a family outside Singapore enters in the reader profile — it appears on the first Wednesday of each term and stays for about six weeks.
• Without them it appears when the family's newest list is about a term old, or there is none yet.

It goes away once a list is added or updated that term. Import a list starts the import, and closing the banner hides it until the next term on that device. Families with term dates also get a notification that Wednesday — New term: add this term's lists — unless a list has already changed that term; turn it off with Reminders and nudges in Settings → Notifications.

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. Sets are sorted by the number in their title, so 第二级 comes after 第一级 and Level 10 after Level 2.

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.

On a wide window the words sit in a column beside the pickers and practice buttons, and the Write practice intro, the Say & repeat summary and the results spread into two or three columns; on a phone the same things stack in one column, in the same order.

Tap a word to hear it. The screen says so above the chips, and the same works on the Write practice intro and on the word-list screen. Each word is a button, so a keyboard (Tab, then Enter) or a screen reader can play it too. On a device with no speech voice available the chips are not tappable and the line is not shown, rather than offering something that does nothing.

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 (Seconds between words, up to 25), and Repeat, Previous and Next step through them. When a word is said more than once, the repeats are spread across that pause rather than said back to back. After the last word the test waits — All words read. Tap Repeat to hear a word again, or Finish test when you have written them all. — so your child can hear the last word again; Next on the last word only skips its pause. Finish test ends it, and 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.

Import a photo is offered everywhere. On Windows the camera route is Use webcam; on a phone, tablet or Mac it is Take a photo, which only appears when the device actually has a camera.

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. Every word gets a frame: where the handwriting itself could not be read well enough to find the word, the frame is placed from the layout of the sheet — the order the words were written in — so it is worth a glance if one looks off. Crop opens on that word's own sheet and frame. 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.

Deleting a run

Delete on a session report removes that run for good: the marks, the per-word cards and the photographs taken for it. It asks first, and it cannot be undone. Once it is gone the report closes and you are back where you came from.

Who can do it depends on whether the run counted for anything:

• Family Managers and Parents can delete any run belonging to a child in their family.
• A Reader can only delete their own run, and only when it clearly did not count — a run that was never marked, or that got nothing right, or that scored 10% or less. A stray photograph of the ceiling is the case this is for.

If a child tries to delete a real result, Zen Reader says "This one counted, so only a parent can delete it." When they are not allowed to delete something the button is simply not there.

If a run was recorded against the wrong child, Reassign… above is the better answer: deleting it loses the work, moving it keeps it.

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.