The spelling list comes home on paper, and every app that could turn it into practice wants you to type the words in first. Fifteen words, on a phone keyboard, while dinner is going. Plenty of parents stop right there.
Spelling Stream reads the list off a photo instead. Point the camera at the sheet from school, and your child is practicing this week's actual words about a minute later.
Photograph the sheet, keep the words, drop the rest
Tap Scan in the Add a Word row and photograph the list. The app then asks you to drag a box around the part of the page that holds the words, and reads what is inside it.
That box does real work. A school spelling sheet is mostly other things: a title, a name and date line, instructions, an empty practice column. Boxing the word column is what keeps “Name:” and “Week 4” from turning up in Friday's test.
The photo stays on your phone
The reading happens on the device, using Google ML Kit. Your child's spelling sheet is never uploaded, to our servers or anyone else's, which means the scan works on a plane, in a parking lot, or anywhere with no signal at all.
It also means there is no photo of your child's schoolwork sitting in someone's cloud. Pro cloud sync carries word lists and progress between family devices so a second phone shows the same picture. Photos, voice recordings and PIN settings stay where they were made.
You approve the list, not the app
Once the words are read, Spelling Stream shows you what it found and waits. Every word has an edit button and a delete button, and a Redo button starts over if the box was in the wrong place.
Give it a read before you import. Text recognition misreads some letter shapes, and a word that comes through wrong gets practiced all week. Words stay editable afterwards too, so a mistake caught on Wednesday is a two-second fix.
Getting a clean scan
Printed sheets scan best. Lay the paper flat instead of holding it, keep your shadow off the page, and fill the frame with the words.
Handwritten lists take more correcting. If your child copied the words into a planner, typing a short list is often quicker, and Type is right there next to Scan.
Or say the words, or type them
All three ways in are free. Speak transcribes words as you say them, which wins when your hands are busy and the sheet is propped against the kettle. It uses your phone's own speech-to-text, transcribing on-device when you are offline; online, the audio may go to Apple or Google to be transcribed, the same as any other dictation on your phone.
What one photo turns into
The scanned words become the whole app. All nine games run on them, from Letter Catch to Space Pulse. So do practice mode, the typed spelling test, and the Written Test, which reads each word aloud and repeats it while your child writes on paper like a real classroom test.
Spelling Stream ships with no word lists of its own. There is no generic third-grade vocabulary half-matching what the teacher assigned, because every word in the app came off your child's sheet.
Each imported word also gets a mic button. Record it in your own voice, and that is the voice your child hears during a test.