Questions parents ask

Primary school children, roughly ages 5 to 11, from Reception to Year 6. It suits any child who gets a spelling list to learn at home. There is nothing in it aimed at a child younger than school age.

No. Spelling Nest opens in a browser on a phone, tablet or laptop. If you want it to feel like an app, use your browser's “Add to home screen” option and it will open full screen from an icon.

No. Spelling Nest needs an internet connection so that progress is saved to your account and is there on every device your family uses.

Anything with a modern browser: an iPad, an Android tablet, a phone, a laptop, a school Chromebook. A tablet is the most comfortable, a phone works fine, and a laptop is fine too.

With your email address. We send you a link that signs you in, so there is no password to remember or reset. Your child never needs an email address of their own.

A grown up types or pastes them into the Grown ups area. The list is cleaned up automatically, so you can paste straight from a message or a photo caption without tidying it first.

Spelling Nest does not set the words. It practises the list your child's school sends home, so it matches whatever they are being taught that week. Every new profile starts with one example list so you can try it before your next list arrives.

One lesson a day is plenty. A lesson is six to twelve questions and usually takes under ten minutes. Practice counts towards the streak on any day a lesson is finished.

Yes. Each child gets their own profile, their own word lists and their own progress, badges and streak, all under one grown up sign in, and one subscription covers all of them.

No. Every answer is given by tapping letter tiles. Spelling Nest never opens a keyboard for an answer, so spelling is tested rather than typing.

On a Listen and spell question, Kit the owl steps in without being asked: first a slow replay with each letter group lighting up, then the first letter, then the number of letters and where the tricky part sits. Words that were helped still count for XP, but not towards mastery.

Type or paste the words in. There is no photo import. In practice reading ten words off a photo and typing them takes under a minute, and it is the only part of the week that asks anything of you.

A word counts as mastered only once it has been spelled from sound, first time, with no clues, on three different days. One correct answer does not clear it off the list, and neither do three correct answers on the same evening.

Because the bar is set where it is. Most apps count a word as learned the first time a child gets it right. That produces a better looking number and a worse one to rely on. The three day rule is slower on purpose.

No, and it is not meant to. Handwriting practice matters and no app changes that. Spelling Nest is designed to sit alongside the exercise book, for the days the writing does not happen.

It has XP, day streaks and badges, because a child who will not open it learns nothing. But the rewards are for turning up rather than for being right, and mastery is measured separately and strictly. The rewards are not the point and the app tries not to let them become the point.

Not directly. Spelling Nest practises the words your child's school has set. Rules are the school's job, and teaching a rule differently from the way the class was taught it would do more harm than good.

A first name or nickname and a school year. Nothing else. No full name, no date of birth, no photograph, no location, no contact details of their own.

Your email address, for the sign in link. The word lists you add and the lesson results sit under your account. We also count anonymous usage events so we can see which parts of the app are used.

No, and there is no third party tracking or advertising script anywhere in the app.

In our database provider's London region.

Open Grown ups and choose to delete all of your family's data. That removes your sign in account and email address, the children's profiles, the word lists and all progress, and it stops any subscription at the same time. You do not need to email us.

The one thing kept is the record of a payment, with your name no longer attached to it, because tax law requires us to hold it.

No. The Grown ups area, where word lists and settings live, sits behind a four digit PIN.

No. Words are read aloud by your own device's built in voice, so what your child hears never leaves the device.

£3 a month, or £20 for the year, which saves you £16. One subscription covers every child in your family, not one child each. New families start with a 14 day free trial, and the first payment is taken at the end of it.

Yes. Your card is added when you start the trial and the first payment is taken at the end of the 14 days. Nothing is taken before that.

The first payment is taken from the card you added at the start, and the subscription carries on from there. If you cancel at any point during the 14 days, nothing is charged at all.

You keep access until the end of the period you have paid for. After that the account goes read only rather than being locked: word lists, progress, streaks and badges all stay visible, and new lessons stop. Nothing is ever deleted.

Yes, in a click, at any time. Cancel during the 14 day trial and you are not charged at all. Cancel later and you keep access until the end of the period you have already paid for.

One person in the United Kingdom, a parent and a qualified teacher. It began with one child in this house who would do almost anything rather than sit down and write his spellings out three times. Spelling Nest is what I built to turn that ten minutes into something he would pick up on his own, alongside the writing rather than instead of it. There is no company, no investors and no advertising department.

Not yet, we have only just started. Look, cover, write, check is the method schools use, and Spelling Nest is a way of practising it at home. If you work for a school and would like to find out more, we would be glad to talk about what a school offer could look like. Email info@spellingnest.co.uk.

There is no school version yet. Spelling Nest is built for families at the moment, and a version a school could buy would need a few things that do not exist today, a data processing agreement among them. If your school is interested, put them in touch at info@spellingnest.co.uk and we will talk. Teachers are very welcome to recommend it to parents in the meantime.

info@spellingnest.co.uk. It reaches one person, who wrote the thing, and who would rather know.