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How to do look, cover, write, check properly

· 8 min read

A closed navy notebook, a navy pencil, a blank ruled notepad partly covered by a kraft card folder, and a mug of tea on a pale wooden table, seen from above.

Look, cover, write, check works when the cover is real and the attempt comes from memory. The child studies the word and notes its tricky part, hides it completely, writes it without peeking, then compares the attempt with the original letter by letter. A wrong attempt means looking again and writing the whole word again, not patching one letter.

Key takeaways

  • The cover is the point of the method: a child who can still see the word is copying it, not recalling it.
  • One attempt has four parts: look and pick out the tricky part, cover the word completely, write it from memory, then check it letter by letter.
  • Education Endowment Foundation guidance says children need to be taught how to use the technique, with the look stage modelled, rather than simply being told to do it.
  • A wrong attempt is useful information: find the exact letter where it went wrong, look again, and write the whole word again.
  • The Department for Education's writing framework includes reviewing earlier words in spelling practice, so a word that was right on Tuesday should come round again on a later day.

What are the four steps, done properly?

Look, cover, write, check has four steps, and each one has a job. Most of the value sits in the second and third. The full method is set out on the look, cover, write, check page.

Look. The child studies the word and decides which part is tricky. The Education Endowment Foundation guidance on teaching strategies that good spellers use includes identifying the tricky part of a word, and the Department for Education writing framework describes learning common exception words by identifying the irregular part. In the word “said”, for example, the tricky part is the “ai”. Naming it aloud gives the child something specific to hold on to. The guidance also says the teacher should model the look stage, which suggests it is a skill rather than a glance.

Cover. The word is hidden completely. A hand over the top does not count if the child can see the edge of the page, and neither does a word on the screen behind the notepad. A folded sheet, a book or a piece of card does the job better than a hand, because it cannot slip.

Write. The child writes the whole word from memory, at a normal pace, without looking back. If the attempt stalls halfway, the honest result is a gap, not a peek.

Check. The child uncovers the original and compares the two, letter by letter, starting at the left. Marking the exact place where the attempt differs, rather than a general cross, tells the child what to fix. The Education Endowment Foundation guidance says feedback should be specific, which fits this step.

Why does the cover matter so much?

The cover matters because it turns copying into recall. When a child writes a word with the model in view, the model does the remembering. When the model is hidden, the child has to bring the spelling back from memory, and that effort is where the practice happens.

There is research on this distinction in young children. A set of classroom experiments by Jones and colleagues compared retrieval practice with a method called rainbow writing, in which children trace or copy words in colour. Children spelled more words correctly after retrieval practice, and in one experiment the advantage was still there five weeks later. The study did not test look, cover, write, check itself, so the sensible reading is narrow: practice that asks a child to recall the word looked better than practice that lets them copy it.

The Education Endowment Foundation guidance makes a related point about teaching in general. It says spelling “must be explicitly taught, rather than simply tested”, and it recommends retrieval practice opportunities that are undertaken consistently. Look, cover, write, check is one way to give a child that opportunity at home, in a few minutes, with a pencil.

What are the most common mistakes?

Six mistakes account for most of the ways the method goes quiet, and most of them are about the cover. The list below comes from how the steps work, not from a study of what families do.

  1. Peeking. The child glances at the word while writing. The attempt is then a copy, and a correct result tells you little about what the child can spell alone.
  2. Copying letter by letter. The child looks at the model for each letter while writing. This is peeking in small pieces, and it is easy to miss because the child never lifts the cover.
  3. Writing the word several times in a row before checking. If the first attempt has a mistake, the next two repeat it, and the child has practised the error three times.
  4. Skipping the check, or checking by eye. A quick glance and a tick lets small errors through. The usual ones are a doubled letter missed, two letters swapped, or a vowel in the wrong place. Comparing letter by letter catches them.
  5. Patching a wrong attempt. The child rubs out the one bad letter and carries on. Looking again and writing the whole word from memory gives another proper attempt, which is the point of the method.
  6. Looking without looking. The child glances at the word for a moment and covers it, without deciding which part is tricky. The look step is short, but it is where the child decides what to remember.

One more is worth naming, and it sits outside a single sitting. A word that was right on one day is not necessarily secure. The writing framework lists reviewing earlier words as part of spelling practice, and the page on how spelling sticks explains why a correct attempt on one day is weaker evidence than a correct attempt on several different days.

What should a parent actually do while a child practises?

A parent's job is small: keep the cover in place, ask which part of the word is tricky, and be present for the check. Most of the failures above happen when nobody is watching the cover, and most of the value of an adult in the room comes from noticing a peek or asking which letters are different, rather than from saying the word aloud or spelling it for the child.

  • Work with a short list, so that the child can give each word a proper attempt. Long lists tend to get rushed.
  • Praise the process, such as keeping the cover down, rather than the number of words right.
  • Let the check be the child's job. The writing framework says correcting every error is unnecessary in marking, and the same restraint is reasonable at the kitchen table.

Keeping the session short and calm matters more than getting through every word in one sitting. A short, calm session is easier to repeat on later days than a long, reluctant one.

Does look, cover, write, check work for every word?

Look, cover, write, check suits words that a child simply has to learn, and it is less useful on its own for words that follow a pattern. The national curriculum spelling appendix says that some spellings cannot be worked out from rules, and that some exception words must be learnt individually. For those words, a method that fixes the whole shape of the word in memory fits.

For words that follow a rule, the same appendix says that knowledge of patterns, prefixes, suffixes and word relationships can help. A child who understands why a word is spelled the way it is has less to memorise, and the tricky part picked out in the look step can be a pattern rather than a single letter.

How often should a word come round again?

A word should come round again on later days, not only on the day it was learnt. The writing framework lists reviewing earlier words, for speed, as part of spelling practice, and describes spelling teaching as regular and broken into small steps. It does not give a number of days, and this post does not either. For the reasoning behind spacing, and what it means for a weekly list, see how spelling sticks.

If you want a printable sheet to run the method on paper, the post on building an editable look, cover, write, check template walks through one.

FAQ

What if my child keeps peeking?

Use a cover that cannot slip, such as a folded sheet or a closed book, and sit where you can see it. If peeking continues, the child may find the recall step uncomfortable because the word is not yet familiar; look at it together for longer, name the tricky part, and try again.

Is there research showing that look, cover, write, check works?

Education Endowment Foundation guidance names the technique and says children should be taught how to use it, with the teacher modelling the look stage. A separate set of classroom experiments with young children found that retrieval practice beat rainbow writing for learning spellings. That study did not test look, cover, write, check itself, so this post makes no further claim.

Should my child write the words by hand?

The usual form of the method is by hand. The writing framework suggests a handwriting task that uses newly taught spellings, and the spelling and handwriting guidance in the same document treats the two as connected. Typing is a different activity; if you use an app, it can sit alongside writing words out rather than replace it.

What should I do if the same word goes wrong every time?

Look at the wrong attempts together and find the one place they share. Name that part as the tricky part, and give the word a few short, separate attempts on different days. If a word stays difficult, it is reasonable to ask the teacher whether there is a pattern or a spelling rule behind it.

Spelling Nest, built by a teacher and parent, uses the same four steps and is meant to sit alongside writing words out by hand, and you can find it at spellingnest.co.uk/app.

Sources

Practice that actually happens.

Add this week's list, hand over the tablet, and see what has stuck before the test rather than after it. Alongside writing the words out by hand, not instead of it.

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