The Weekly Spelling List: Full Marks on Friday, Gone by Monday

13 September 2026 · by Larry

Thursday night, the list comes out. Twelve words, gone through three or four times at the kitchen table. Friday, the test comes back: full marks.

The following week, one of those words turns up in a piece of writing, spelt wrong. Not a near miss either — spelt the way it sounds, as if the list had never happened.

It is tempting to decide she was not paying attention on Thursday. She was. The Friday score was real. It just measured something narrower than it looked like: she could hold those twelve words for about a day. Holding a word until the test and keeping a word are different things, and the way most of us practise a spelling list builds the first and not the second.

Why the night before works — for the test

A list crammed on Thursday is fresh on Friday morning. The test asks, she answers, and then nothing ever asks for those words again in that form. A week later they have faded, and nobody finds out until a composition or a worksheet needs one of them.

So the Friday score is not a lie, but it is not the finish line either. The goal is not "full marks on Friday". The goal is "still right in three weeks' time, in a sentence she wrote herself". Everything below is aimed at that.

Copying is not practising

The most common way to practise a list is to write each word out five times. It feels productive, the page fills up, and it teaches surprisingly little.

Watch what actually happens. She looks at the word, writes it. Looks at the line above, writes it again. Her hand is copying from the page. At no point does she have to pull the word out of her own memory — and that is the only thing the test asks her to do. The test gives her nothing to look at.

So practise the way the test works. The simplest version has four steps:

• Look at the word and say it.
• Cover it.
• Write it from memory.
• Check it against the original, letter by letter, herself.

It is slower than copying and it feels harder. That is the point. The effort of dragging the word back is what makes it stick.

Three short goes, not one long one

A few minutes on three different days does more than half an hour the night before. Each time, the word has had a chance to fade a little, and pulling it back from a slightly faded memory is exactly the practice that keeps it.

If the list comes home on Monday, a quick look-cover-write on Monday, again on Wednesday, and a final run on Thursday is plenty. On Wednesday, only the words she got wrong on Monday need the full treatment. The rest just need a quick check that they are still there.

Hear it in a sentence

Read out "flower" on its own and a child can reasonably write "flour". "There" could be "their". "Practice" could be "practise". Both spellings are real words; only the sentence decides which one is right.

So when you read a word out, say it in a sentence too. "Flour. Mummy needs flour for the cake." It also checks something the list alone does not: whether she knows what the word means, which is where comprehension marks quietly come from as well — the same gap behind reading fluently but losing comprehension marks.

The British spelling trap

Singapore schools teach British spelling. Colour, favourite, travelled, centre, and practise as the verb. A great deal of what children read and watch at home is American: videos, games, and tablet keyboards set to US English that "correct" colour to color in front of them.

A child who types a lot can end up with the American version firmly in her head, spelt confidently and marked wrong. If a word on the list keeps coming back without its u or with one l in travelled, this is usually why. Two things help: tell her plainly that there are two spellings and school uses the British one, and check which English the tablet's keyboard is set to.

Sort the misses before practising them

Not every wrong spelling is the same mistake, and each needs something slightly different.

• Spelt the way it sounds — becos, frend. She has the sounds right. What she lacks is the part of the word that does not follow the sound. Show her only that part.
• Right letters, wrong order — freind, wierd. This is a picture-of-the-word problem. Look-cover-write-check is exactly the fix.
• One tricky bit — the double letter in beginning, the silent k in knee. The rest of the word is fine. Underline just the tricky bit and practise that, instead of rewriting the whole word again.

And practise only the missed words. Going through all twelve again every night spends most of the time on the eight she already knows.

Two tries, then look

If she has had two goes at a word and both were wrong, stop her guessing. A third, fourth and fifth guess is practice at spelling it wrong. Show her the word, let her look at it properly, cover it, and ask her to write it once from memory. Then put it back into the pile for later.

听写 is a different job

Chinese dictation looks like a spelling test and works quite differently.

Practise words, not single characters. The same character can be read differently depending on the word it sits in: 行 is háng in 银行 but xíng in 行人, and 长 is zhǎng in 长大 but cháng in 长江. Drilling characters on their own can fix the wrong reading in her head. Practise the words as they appear on the list.

Practise on paper. 听写 is written by hand, and a character with a stroke missing or a part in the wrong place is not the same character. Typing or tapping cannot practise that. Read the word out, she writes it on paper, then she checks against the list.

If pinyin is part of it, the usual mix-ups are the tone, z/zh, c/ch, s/sh, n/l, and the endings an/ang, en/eng, in/ing. When she gets one wrong, it is worth saying which of those it was, because the same confusion tends to come back on other words.

If you do not read Chinese

Plenty of parents cannot read the list their child brings home, and assume that means they cannot help with 听写. You can.

You do not need to read the characters to run the session. Something else can read the words aloud — a recording, the teacher's audio if there is one, or a device voice. She writes on paper. Then comes the part that matters, and it needs no Chinese at all: she checks her own writing against the printed list, one character at a time, pointing. You are not marking. You are making sure the checking is slow and honest.

You can compare shapes without knowing what they say. "Show me where yours matches" works in any language. A child who knows her parent is watching the checking, not the score, is much less likely to glance at a character and call it right.

The two minutes on Monday

This is the step almost everyone skips, and it is the one that turns a Friday score into a word she keeps.

The Monday after the test, before the new list takes over, read out the words she got wrong on Friday, plus two or three from the week before. Two minutes. Any that are still wrong go into this week's practice alongside the new list.

That is all a word needs to survive: to be asked for again after it has had a chance to fade.

What does not help

• Writing each wrong word ten times. It is copying again, and now it is a punishment as well.
• The whole list, every night. Most of the time goes on words she already knows.
• Spelling it out loud instead of writing it. Saying the letters is a different skill from writing the word, and the test is written.
• Turning Thursday night into a verdict. The same separation that keeps checking homework from becoming a fight works here: practise first, check briefly, and keep any teaching for another evening.

Where a screen fits, honestly

StudyLab's Spell Lab was built for the weekly list. You can type or paste your child's own list, and it stays on your device — nothing is uploaded, and there is no sign-up. Each of its built-in English words is read aloud with a sentence, so flour and flower can be told apart; a word you add yourself is read by your device's own voice. After a first wrong try it gives the first letter and the number of letters; after a second it shows the word rather than let her keep guessing, and every missed word comes back at the end. For Chinese it does 听写 the way it is done at home: the word is read out, she writes on paper, then checks herself.

Two honest limits. Its built-in word banks are common primary words graded by level, not any school's list — the list the teacher sent home is the one that matters, so use that. And a screen is not paper. A child who spells well on a tablet still needs the words written by hand, for the reasons in when your child can do it on screen but not on paper.

If the spelling is fine and it is the grammar that keeps costing marks, the English practice and the English topics level by level are the better place to start.

The short version

• Full marks on Friday means she held the words for a day. Keeping them is a separate job.
• Copying the word five times is not practice. Look, cover, write, check.
• A few minutes on three days beats half an hour the night before.
• Say each word in a sentence, so flour and flower are different words.
• School uses British spelling; check what the tablet keyboard is teaching.
• Two wrong tries, then show her the word. Do not let her practise guessing.
• For 听写, practise whole words, on paper, and let her check character by character — you do not need to read Chinese to watch that.
• On Monday, two minutes re-testing Friday's misses. That is what makes the words stay.