How to Help Your Child Remember Their Spellings

How can I help my child remember their spellings?

The fastest way to help your child remember spellings is to change two things about how they practise: get them to spell each word from memory rather than copying it, and spread that practice across several short sessions instead of one long cram. These two habits, retrieval and spacing, have more evidence behind them than any other study method. In one well-known study, children who practised by testing themselves remembered about 50% more a week later than children who simply re-read the same material (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006).

Everything else in this guide is a practical way of doing those two things. None of it requires you to be a teacher, and none of it takes more than ten minutes at a time.

Why does my child forget spellings so quickly?

Children forget spellings quickly because a word learned for Friday's test sits in short-term memory, and short-term memory fades fast without a reason to recall the word again. This is the normal forgetting curve, first described over a century ago, and not a sign your child isn't trying. Within a week or two, most children can no longer spell most of the words they aced on test day.

This is why the familiar Monday-list, Friday-test routine so often disappoints. The test sits at the end of the week, so the words only need to survive a few days. Nothing in the routine asks the child to remember them in a fortnight, so their brain quietly lets them go. We unpack the memory science in more depth in the science of spelling.

What actually makes spellings stick?

Two things make spellings stick: retrieval practice (recalling a word from memory) and spaced repetition (revisiting it at growing intervals). Decades of memory research point to these as the most powerful, reliable levers for durable learning, far more effective than re-reading or copying out.

Retrieval is the engine. Every time your child pulls a spelling out of their own head, rather than looking at it, the memory gets stronger. Crucially, getting a word wrong and then seeing the correct spelling builds a stronger long-term trace than getting it right first time. Mistakes aren't wasted; they're part of how the learning happens.

Spacing is the multiplier. There's a window, just before your child would otherwise forget a word, where practising it produces the strongest memory. Bringing words back after a day, then a few days, then a week, schedules practice to hit that window again and again (Cepeda et al., 2006). Our parents' guide to how spaced repetition works walks through this in plain terms.

Six ways to help your child remember spellings

Here are six simple routines, each one a practical version of "test, then space it out". You don't need all six. Pick two or three that fit your evenings.

1. Test, don't copy. Read the word aloud and ask your child to write it from memory before they check it. The moment of recall is where the learning is. Copying a word ten times, by contrast, keeps their eyes on the answer and teaches almost nothing.
2. Space it across the week. Practise a word today, again tomorrow, then leave a gap of a few days, then a week. A word that survives a week-long gap is genuinely learned. Cramming all the words the night before is the least effective option.
3. Use look–cover–write–check. Your child looks at the word, covers it, writes it from memory, then uncovers to check. It's the classic method for a reason: it builds in both retrieval and instant feedback, the exact combination the research favours.
4. Find the pattern in the word. Show your child why a word is spelled the way it is: the un- prefix, the doubled letter in running, the silent b in doubt. Words children understand are far easier to remember than random letter strings. Our year-by-year spelling guide shows the patterns taught in each school year.
5. Sort words by their pattern. Write this week's words on slips of paper and have your child group them: silent letters here, -tion endings there. Sorting forces a close look at how words are built, which helps the pattern transfer to brand-new words. We have free word-sort worksheets for Y1–Y6.
6. Keep it short. Five to ten minutes, a few times a week, beats one long Sunday-night session. Short, frequent, test-style practice is the single most effective routine, and it's far easier to sustain (Baddeley & Longman, 1978).

How often should my child practise spellings?

Short and frequent beats long and occasional. Three or four sessions of five to ten minutes across a week will move spelling along faster than one thirty-minute push, because spacing the practice is what drives words into long-term memory. Research on skill learning found that the same amount of practice, broken into shorter, more frequent sessions, produced faster and more durable learning than longer, massed sessions (Baddeley & Longman, 1978).

Practically, this means you can stop dreading a big weekly homework slot. A couple of minutes over breakfast and a couple before bed, a few days a week, is not only easier to fit in. It's genuinely more effective.

What about tricky words that won't stick?

For a word that refuses to stick, give your child a hook: break it into parts they can see and say. February becomes Feb-ru-ar-y; separate hides a rat ("there's a rat in sepa-rat-e"); necessary has one collar and two sleeves (one c, two ss). A silly memory phrase or a clear chunk gives the brain something to grab.

Morphology helps too. If your child knows sign sits inside signal and signature, the otherwise-silent g suddenly makes sense: it belongs to the word's family. Understanding why a spelling is what it is turns memorising into reasoning, and reasoning sticks. If a particular pattern is causing trouble, our free spelling resources cover the trickiest ones year by year.

Where a spelling app fits in

The hardest part of all this for a busy parent isn't the testing, it's the timing. Remembering which words each child should revisit today, and which can wait until next week, is exactly the kind of bookkeeping a good app does automatically. That's the gap SpellCast is built to fill.

SpellCast loads your child's actual statutory year-group words (Reception to Year 6), reads each one aloud in clear British English so they can practise independently, and quietly schedules every word using spaced retrieval: spell it right and it comes back days or weeks later; get it wrong and it returns sooner. To your child it just feels like a quick game with a wizard who levels up. Underneath, it's making sure every word is practised at the moment it will stick best, the thing a private tutor does, for every word, for free for the first six weeks.

It isn't the only good option (our guide to spelling apps for kids compares the main ones honestly), and an app earns its place by removing the timing problem, not by replacing the five minutes you spend together.

The bottom line

Your child forgets spellings because the usual routine only asks them to remember the words for a few days. Flip two things and that changes: have them spell each word from memory instead of copying it, and spread practice into short sessions across the week rather than one cram. Add a pattern, a memory hook, and a bit of patience with mistakes, and the words move from Friday's test into long-term memory, where you actually want them. If you'd rather not track the timings yourself, making it playful and letting a spaced-repetition app handle the schedule does the heavy lifting for you.

Sources: Roediger, H.L. & Karpicke, J.D. (2006). Test-Enhanced Learning. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255. · Cepeda, N.J. et al. (2006). Distributed Practice in Verbal Recall Tasks. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380. · Baddeley, A. & Longman, D.J.A. (1978). The Influence of Length and Frequency of Training Sessions on the Rate of Learning to Type. Ergonomics, 21(8).