Spelling Worksheet Generator

Type this week’s spelling words below and print the sheets. Whether the list came home from school in a folder or you wrote it yourself, the words go in once and come out as worksheets: cards to cut out, ruled lines to trace and copy, a page to write them from memory, and a word search and scramble that each print an answer key. You pick which sheets you want, and a sheet that cannot set your list tells you which word is the problem instead of leaving it off.

Your list stays in this browser. The sheets are built on your own computer and printed from it, so nothing you type is uploaded, saved or sent anywhere. There is no email box and no account.

Which spelling worksheet generators let you use your own words?

Most children’s spelling apps will not let you type in your own words, and the ones that do handle it in different ways. If you are choosing between tools rather than just printing something tonight, this is the question that separates them. The table below is what we have checked on each company’s own pages, with the date we read them.

Tool	Takes your own spelling list?	What it does with it
This page	Yes, typed in	Prints six kinds of worksheet. Nothing is stored
Starfall	Only in its printable generators	Its spelling game itself uses fixed word sets. It tracks no progress, by its own description
Squeebles Spelling Connect	Yes, with your own recorded audio	Custom lists in the app, not in the web version. Built to the English National Curriculum
Sight Words: Dolch Coach	Yes, recorded in your voice or your child’s	A $6.99 app that was last updated in August 2019, though it still runs. Worth knowing before you buy
Reading Eggs, HOMER, Teach Your Monster, Endless Reader	Not that we can confirm	None of their own pages offers it. An unconfirmed absence is not the same as a no

What we could not check, we have left blank rather than guessed. These pages change, and a comparison that quietly goes stale is worse than one that says what it does not know.

How do you practice a spelling list at home?

The gap between getting a list on Monday and being tested on Friday is the part that decides whether the words stick, and two things about how you use those days are better supported than anything about the worksheet itself.

A 2013 review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest assessed ten common study techniques and rated only two as high utility: practice testing (retrieving an answer rather than rereading it) and distributed practice (spreading study across days rather than massing it), according to Dunlosky and colleagues. Their evidence is mostly from older students, and the review does not study spelling lists, so treat it as being about how to practice rather than about spelling specifically. It does report testing effects in preschool and kindergarten children, and that learners of all ages benefit from spreading study out.

The practical version of both, for a list of ten words and four evenings:

1. 1

   Read the list together on the first night

   Read each word aloud, then have your child read it back. This is the only step where they see all the words at once, and it takes about two minutes. Print the word cards if you want something to hold.

2. 2

   Practice a few words a day, not all of them

   Four or five words on Monday, the next few on Tuesday. Spreading practice across days rather than massing it the night before is one of the two study techniques Dunlosky and colleagues rated as high utility in their 2013 review.

3. 3

   Cover the word before they write it

   Reading a word and copying it is not the same task as producing it from memory. The write-from-memory sheet puts the word at the start of the row for reading, then gives two spaces with nothing to copy from.

4. 4

   Retest only the words they missed

   A word your child spelled correctly on Tuesday does not need Thursday. Typing just the missed words back in gives you a shorter sheet for the last night, which is the one a tired child will actually finish.

Why covering the word matters more than it sounds. Copying a word and producing it from memory are different tasks, and only the second one builds the connection between how a word sounds and how it is spelled. Work on orthographic mapping by Linnea Ehri describes those connections as what glues a spelling to its pronunciation in memory, which is the thing a Friday test is actually checking.

What font should a spelling worksheet use?

Every sheet here is set in one face, with no font menu, and that is a decision rather than a missing feature. The face has a single-storey a and g, the shapes a child is taught to write, rather than the two-storey versions most fonts use for both. A font menu would let a parent pick a face that teaches a different letter shape from the one their child is practicing at school.

The ruled sheets use three lines, not one. A top line, a dashed middle line and a baseline are what make letter size teachable: the dashed line is where most lowercase letters stop, and the top line is where an ascender goes. College-ruled paper gives a child one line, which teaches placement and nothing else.

And every sheet prints in black. Practice words set in color cost ink to say nothing, and they come out weaker than black on the nearly empty cartridge most worksheets meet. The only color on any of these pages is on an answer key, where it means something.

Blank handwriting paper, for the words you would rather write yourself

Sometimes the sheet you want is the one with nothing on it. If you would rather write the words in your own handwriting for your child to copy, or you want paper ready before next week’s list arrives, the blank pack below is three pages of primary-ruled paper: wide lines, standard lines, and a page of model rows for a grown-up to fill in with copying bands underneath.

Free PDF · no sign-up

Free printable handwriting paper (PDF)

Three pages of primary-ruled paper with nothing printed on them. Wide lines for a child just starting to write, standard lines for kindergarten and first grade, and a third page of model rows for a grown-up to fill in with two copying bands under each. It is the one sheet here that never goes out of date, because the words are yours. No account, no email, no watermark.

1. Handwriting Paper (PDF)23 ruled lines · 3 pagesDownload

A handwriting worksheet generator, too

The copy-the-word sheet is a handwriting worksheet generator in its own right. If handwriting rather than spelling is what you are working on, type any words you like into the tool above, tick only Copy the word, and you get ruled practice lines with your own words at the start of each.

It sets print script rather than cursive, at the two letter sizes our blank handwriting paper uses, so a child moving between the two meets one letter shape and one size. It takes up to 20 words and rules 8 lines to a page. For a child who is still learning individual letters rather than whole words, the letter tracing worksheets are the better place to start, and name tracing is where most children want to begin.

What does this spelling worksheet generator not do?

It makes paper, for one child, and it does not mark anything. Being specific about that is quicker than letting you find out:

• No on-screen test. Everything here is printed. There is no read-aloud voice, no typing the answer into the page, and nothing that scores a child.
• No multiple choice. Every sheet asks a child to produce the word rather than pick it.
• One child, not a class. The sheets are sized for a single child at a table, and the cards print 10 to a page, so a class of 24 means 24 print runs rather than one.
• Nothing is saved. No accounts, no saved lists, no history. Next week’s list is typed in again.
• No cursive, and no font choice.
• It does not choose the words. The list is your school’s or yours. We apply no order, no grade level and no view about which words belong on it.

Where to go next

If you want the words themselves rather than a way to print your own, our spelling lists are grouped by the pattern the words share: kindergarten, 1st grade and 2nd grade. Each one arrives with its sheets already made, so there is nothing to type.

If the trouble is not the list but the spelling itself, why spelling is hard covers what is actually going wrong, and how to teach spelling at home covers the teaching a worksheet cannot do.