Do you need a spelling tutor?
LexiKey is not a tutor, and it would be easy to let you assume otherwise. It is daily spelling practice that does some of what a tutor does, for free. Here is where the line actually falls, so you can work out which one your child needs.
What a human tutor gives you
A good specialist tutor watches your child work and adjusts in the moment. They notice that the problem is confidence rather than phonics, or that a word was misread rather than misspelled. They hold a child's attention on a bad afternoon. None of that can be automated, and this page is not going to claim it can.
The constraint is arithmetic. Tutoring is priced by the hour and usually happens once a week. Spelling is a memory problem, and memory responds to short, frequent repetition rather than one long session every seven days.
What LexiKey does in between
- Finds the level. A short placement test works out which spelling patterns are already solid, so practice starts where the gaps are.
- Teaches by rule, not by list. 1,114 words are grouped into 108 phonics patterns following the same Orton-Gillingham approach specialist tutors are trained in. Learning one word in a group helps with the rest of it.
- Notices hesitation, not just errors. A word typed correctly after a long pause has not been learned yet. Those go into a review bucket and come back until they are right three times running.
- Runs every day. Ten minutes daily beats an hour weekly for this particular problem, and it costs nothing to do it.
What it does not do
- It cannot diagnose dyslexia. That needs a qualified assessor, and if you suspect it, the assessment is worth more than any app.
- It does not teach reading, comprehension or writing — only spelling, through typing.
- It will not persuade a reluctant child to sit down. There is no reward loop pushing them to come back, on purpose.
- It cannot tell you why your child is struggling. It can show you which patterns they miss, which is a useful thing to bring to someone who can.
So which do you need?
If your child is behind on spelling and nobody knows why, get an assessment first. If spelling is the specific problem and you know it, daily practice on the right patterns will do more than a weekly hour — and you can start that this afternoon for nothing.
If you already have a tutor, this is what fills the six days between sessions. Bring them the list of patterns that keep coming back; it is the part they would otherwise spend the first twenty minutes working out.
Why I built it
I am dyslexic. Writing a word out ten times never made it stick, and it did not stick for anyone I went to school with either. What eventually fixed a handful of words for me was typing them a few thousand times as a developer, entirely by accident. LexiKey is that on purpose, organized by the rules a tutor would teach.