Announcing Spelling Mode: The first digital tool to read and support encoding via touch input

Every experienced reading teacher knows that if a student can spell a word, they can typically read it. And now, for the first time, the Project Read Tutor supports both reading and spelling. Spelling Mode, now live as a beta feature, brings encoding practice into the same Tutor students already use for oral decoding and fluency practice.

Here's how it works, why we built it, and what we've heard from the teachers and students who've been using it since this winter.

Introducing Spelling Mode

Here's how it works:

1. Teachers toggle student’s mode in their Tutor dashboard to Spelling
2. A target word is read aloud with a student-friendly definition or example sentence, following the UFLI lesson the student is currently on.
3. The student writes the word on screen using their finger or a stylus, or on keyboard for non-touchscreen devices.
4. The Tutor reads their attempt and maps it into Elkonin boxes, color-coded for accuracy by grapheme.
5. Students receive targeted feedback and advance once they've shown proficiency on their current UFLI lesson.

Why Spelling Mode

There's a truth that every experienced reading teacher knows: spelling and reading are deeply intertwined skills.

When a student learns to decode the word "brush," they're building a mapping between the letters on the page and the sounds they represent. When they spell the same word, they have to retrieve that mapping from memory and reproduce it on the page from scratch. Encoding and decoding are symbiotic processes that reinforce one another. If a student can spell a word, they can typically read it. Spelling presents a rich window into a student's understanding of phonics concepts.

The research on graphomotor practice adds another layer. For young students whose fine motor skills are still developing, the physical act of forming letters on paper, a whiteboard, or a screen is not incidental to learning. The motor memory of writing a word activates and reinforces the phonological and orthographic representations being built in parallel. Typing is simply not viable, or as productive, for many of the youngest learners.

Multiple choice and tap-to-select formats have a different but related limitation. They proxy for whether a student recognizes a correct answer when they see it. However, these input modalities cannot tell you whether a student can encode or decode a word independently, or support them when they get stuck. Consequently, digital methods of supporting emerging spellers have been fundamentally limited. That's what we intended to solve.

Built Around UFLI's Scope sequence and sequence, with vocab support

Spelling Mode follows the UFLI Foundations scope and sequence, the same sequence that anchors our reading tutor. Target words are drawn from the student's current UFLI lesson, so practice is always aligned to what they're learning.

Working with our friends at UFLI, we also built upon their recent work in vocabulary supplementation, each target word is presented with a student-friendly definition or example sentence. "Brush: you use a brush to paint a picture."

What We've Heard From the Field

Spelling Mode has been in the hands of teachers and students since this winter, and the feedback has been strong.

Teachers have also pointed to something more practical: spelling practice doesn't require headphones or microphones, and it isn't affected by classroom background noise. Unlike speech recognition, which can struggle with student accents, articulation differences, and noisy environments, a student writing sidesteps articulation challenges or whether they have the right headphones.

Students have taken to the tactile input naturally. Writing on screen with a finger feels closer to writing on a whiteboard than typing into a box, and that physical act of forming letters matters for encoding. Several teachers noted that students who had been disengaged in reading mode became noticeably more focused when they had to produce the word themselves. Even more importantly, students told us this too.

What This Means for Your Classroom

Spelling Mode is included in all existing Project Read Tutor subscriptions. No upgrade, no add-on, no extra cost. Go to your classroom's Tutor view, switch the mode to Spelling, and your students can try it today.

This is a beta release. We're still learning and still building, and we genuinely want to hear from you. And if your school or district is interested in a free trial or a quote, reach out to sales@projectread.ai.