Thirty words in front of your child. They can already spell most of them cold. Four still need more practice — and a couple of those need it every single week.
Then they practice all thirty. In the same order. Night after night.
Look at where that time actually goes. Most of it goes to words your child had down weeks ago, and the four that still need work get a fraction of what they need. Test day comes around and those same four are the ones that slip.
Focus Words fixes the order, not the workload. Spelling Stream learns which words your child keeps getting wrong and puts those first — in practice, in tests, and in all nine games. Same words. Same ten minutes. The ones that still need work just come up more.
Thirty is only an example. Focus Words works across every list you've made, at whatever length you made it — a ten-word Friday list, a fifty-word unit review, a running list you've been building since September. Pro lists are unlimited, and the words that still need work rise to the front of all of them.
One miss is all it takes to get on the list. There's no threshold to cross and no pattern to establish. Your child misses a word once, and from then on it comes up early — until they can spell it right three times in a row.
Why three in a row, and not one. One correct answer isn't evidence. Kids guess letters. They recognize a word from the screen two seconds ago. They land on it by accident. Any of those would retire a word that isn't actually learned.
Three consecutive correct attempts — usually spread across different games on different evenings — is a great deal harder to get by luck. The streak resets on a miss, so a word that was nearly retired but is still shaky goes straight back to the front.
It's a deliberately cautious bar. Retire a word too early and it turns up unpracticed on Friday's test. Retire it too late and your child spends a few extra seconds on a word they already knew. Those two mistakes don't cost the same, so the rule leans toward keeping a word in rotation.
A word can also reach Expert without ever being missed. Spell it right three times running from the start and the app takes the hint.
Three settings, and you pick one. They live in Parent Center, behind the parent lock.
Off is the default for everyone, including people who already subscribe. Words come up in list order or shuffled, exactly as each game is set, and nothing in your child's history changes what they see next.
Focus Words puts the missed words first — in practice, in both tests, and in all nine games.
Focus Words with Repeat does all of that and brings difficult words back a second time later in the same session. Not straight away: a word answered correctly ten seconds ago proves nothing about whether it stuck. Later in the same sitting, with other words in between, is where a second attempt is worth something. Repeat applies to practice and to seven of the nine games — never to the spelling test or the written test, because repeating a word in a graded test would produce eleven answers for a ten-word list.
What you can see as a parent. Your word list marks every word currently in focus, so you can see what your child is working on without running a report. Each child's profile splits their words three ways:
Focus — missed at least once, not yet retired, and listed by name underneath so you know exactly which words to help with at the kitchen table. Expert — spelled right three times in a row; done, for now. Pending — not attempted enough times to say either way.
That third bucket is deliberate, and it's the one that makes the chart worth trusting. A word your child has tried once is a word nobody has information about, and calling it "known" would be flattering and wrong. Early in a new list most words sit in Pending — that's the correct answer, not a gap.
The profile is there to tell you where to spend Thursday evening. There's no percentage, no level, and no comparison to other children. It doesn't rank your child, and nothing in the app tells them they're behind.
It doesn't change what counts as correct. A right answer is right whether Focus Words is on or off. The feature changes the order words are asked in, and nothing else — switch it on and you will never see your child's score change for the same spelling. It doesn't add practice either. Same list, same number of words; the only thing that moves is which ones come first.
It also doesn't override you. Every game, practice, and both tests keep their own word-order control. Choose "In Order" and you get plain list order with the focus weighting ignored entirely — useful for a first pass at a brand-new list, where nothing has been attempted and there's nothing to prioritize yet.
It stays off until you turn it on. Subscribing to Pro does not switch this on for you. You're asked once, in plain language, with a turn-it-on button and a no-thanks button. Decline and it stays off until you enable it yourself, and you can change your mind either way, any time, in Parent Center. Your child can't switch it — it sits behind the parent lock with every other setting.
Focus Words keeps a record of one child's mistakes and uses that record to decide what that child sees next. That isn't something to start on a family's behalf and mention afterward.
Everything it does happens on the device. The record never leaves your phone or tablet unless you turn on Cloud Sync, and it's never used for advertising — there are no ads in Spelling Stream at all. Cloud Sync only matters if you want the same picture on a second device.
Focus Words is part of Spelling Stream Pro. Without Pro, practice and games run through the list in order or shuffled, exactly as they always have — every game, every word, nothing held back. Nothing was taken away from anyone to make room for this. Pro adds the part that learns from your child.
Same words either way. Pro just knows which ones still need the work.