Missing letters worksheets

Never the first letter, and never two in a row: those two rules are what make this an exercise rather than a puzzle. A child reading “_at” has a word to work from; a child reading “_ _ t” has a lottery. What is being practiced is the middle of a word, which is where nearly every spelling mistake in English actually happens — the vowels a speaker cannot hear the difference between and the doubled consonants nobody sounds out.

The words are the longer sight words, which is where the gaps do the most work. “Because”, “before”, “around” and “always” are all misspelled in the middle by the same children who can spell them aloud, and a gap in that exact position is a question they cannot answer by sounding it out. The answer key on the page behind prints the letters back in, so this can be marked by somebody who was not sitting next to them.

The answers were decided when the sheet was built, so the key is the same page with them drawn in rather than a second attempt at the same questions — there is no way for the two to disagree. The number in the footer is the seed the sheet was built from: it is printed so that the identical sheet can be had again next week, rather than one that merely looks like it.

This page is one sheet out of a family that can print thousands. The words on it are one of the shipped sight-word lists, and the box that holds them takes a typed or pasted list instead — this week’s spellings off a school letter, or a list you already keep in the game. The same words then print as any of the seven styles: written out, in word shapes, with letters missing, in ABC order, in a sentence, found among near misses, or as a blank test.

The settings travel in the link rather than on a server, so a sheet you make can be bookmarked or sent to another family as it stands — and the Name: line is printed blank, because there is nowhere in a shared link to put a child’s name. See what we don’t collect.

Word Jungle deals the sight-word lists as flash cards: the word is read aloud, in a sentence, and typed back — which is the half of spelling a worksheet cannot do, because paper cannot say a word out loud. A child who has just worked through a page is the one likeliest to race it, and the record book then knows which words they keep missing, so the next sheet can be exactly those.