Spelling word wheel

Which spelling words are on the wheel?

The 40 words are high-frequency words that second and third graders use in their own writing all the time but often misspell, because they do not follow the simple sound patterns children learned first. They fall into a few groups:

• Silent or surprising letters: write, knew, laugh, answer, bright, catch, through, thought.
• The “-ould” family: would, could, should.
• Homophones that trip people up: their, there, where, and which.
• Unexpected vowels: because, friend, again, people, many, money, pretty, young, enough, sure.
• Longer everyday words: different, breakfast, birthday, family, animal, around, before, always.

Several of them also appear on the well-known Dolch and Fry sight-word lists, so they will be familiar from reading as well as spelling.

How do I use my own class spelling list?

Open Edit as text, select everything, and paste your weekly list in, one word per line. You can copy a column straight from a spreadsheet or a document. Close the editor and the wheel shows your words. To keep the list for the week, press Share or embed and save the link; open it on the classroom board on Monday and on a parent’s phone for homework practice on Wednesday. Parents can bookmark the same link to practise at home.

If you teach several groups, make one wheel per group and save each link with the group name. The page itself always resets to our default words.

Spelling bee practice in class

The how-to above gives you a fair bee: nobody can accuse you of handing their friend the easy words, because the wheel picked them. Choose the speller at random too with the name picker for teachers, which removes each child after their turn. Full screen mode on a projector makes the spin a moment everyone watches.

For extra rounds, try a spelling relay: spin a word, and each child in a row adds the next letter. Or word detectives: spin a word and ask which letters are silent or which other words share its pattern. The classroom spinner games guide has scoring ideas that keep the whole class engaged.

Practising spelling at home

Short and often beats long and rare. Five spins a day, spelled aloud or on a whiteboard, is plenty for most seven- and eight-year-olds. Keep the words that are going well on the wheel for confidence, and add the misses back in by typing them into the box so they come round again. A quick letter warm-up on the alphabet wheel for kids helps younger siblings join in.

Can I make harder words come up more often?

Yes. Turn on Use weights in Settings and give the words a child keeps missing a weight of 2 or 3. Their slices grow and they come up more often, while mastered words still appear now and then for review. Turn weights off again for a test so every word is equally likely, as described in the randomness guide.

About this list

We compiled these 40 words ourselves as typical tricky words for grades 2 to 3. It is not an official curriculum list, and schools use different programs, so treat it as a starting set. Only words that are spelled the same in American and British English are included, which keeps it useful in any classroom.