Spelling that feels like a walk, not a worksheet.
A trail is about eight words and about five minutes. Each word is asked in the way that suits it, and the ones that get missed quietly come back until they stick. No accounts, no ads, nothing to sign up for.
Works in any modern browser · Free and open source · Nothing to install
Short enough to finish, spaced enough to stick.
The whole design assumes a child who has ten minutes before dinner and no patience for a loading screen.
Pick a trail
Six tiers of sixty-four words, or this week's list from school. Each trail draws from the pool, so replaying a tier gives a mostly different set.
Walk it
Eight or so questions, each in the mode that suits the word. Recall checkpoints — where the whole word has to be produced from scratch — are spaced evenly rather than saved for the end.
Miss one? It comes back.
Once before the trail ends, one step easier. Then it waits at review camp until it's been answered cleanly twice.
The same word, asked five different ways.
Recognising a word and producing it are different skills. A trail exercises both, and steps down to an easier mode rather than showing a question that can't be answered.
Listen & spot
RECOGNITIONHear the word, then pick it from three spellings — two of which are plausible mistakes a child would actually make, not obvious non-words.
Fill the gap
STRUCTUREThe word appears as its syllable chunks with one replaced by a ?. Choose the piece that belongs there.
Build the word
STRUCTURETap every chunk in order. A long word stops being one intimidating shape and becomes three small ones.
Memory trail
RECALL CHECKPOINTThe word is shown for a few seconds — longer words get longer, up to five — then hidden, and asked for from memory.
Typing checkpoint
RECALL CHECKPOINTNo options, no letters on screen. Just the word spoken aloud and an empty box.
A word can be right ten times and still have been missed this morning.
That's why review camp doesn't track a total score. A word joins the moment it's missed and only leaves after two clean answers since the mistake — so getting it right in the same trail counts towards getting out, which is the whole point.
The queue is ordered neediest-first: fewest clean answers since the miss, then the freshest mistake. A review trail takes from the front of that list rather than sampling it.
A children's app that collects nothing.
Not "collects nothing important" — there is no account to collect it against. Progress lives in the browser on the device, and that's the whole system.
otter-sequoia-thicket-3341. That code is the only key — and the app says so plainly.
Set it up once, then stay out of the way.
This week's spelling list
Paste it in, one per line or comma-separated. Use word: sentence to
supply your own sentence. The app syllabifies each word and generates its
decoys, so a bare list still plays every mode.
Up to six players
One device, six children, separate progress, badges, word lists, and companions. Each has their own trail length — 3, 5, 8, 12, or 16 words.
Pick a better voice
Browsers default to the oldest, most robotic voice installed. Spell Trail scores the available ones and picks the best — and you can override it.
Nothing is locked
Fireflies buy cosmetic trail companions and nothing else. No word, tier, or feature is ever gated behind a currency or a purchase.
The code is on GitHub. All of it.
Anyone can point an AI at a product and say "make me one of these," so pretending the code is a secret seems like the wrong bet. We'd rather build in the open, be checkable about the privacy claims on this page, and compete on the experience.