Missing Letters Puzzle

Fill in the missing letters

Each word prints with some of its letters replaced by blanks. The child writes them back in. Up to twenty words a sheet, with an optional word bank at the foot of the page and an answer key on request.

Type your own word list, or use the built-in one. Your own is almost always better — this week's spellings, the topic words, the words a particular child keeps getting wrong.

Vowels or consonants: a different exercise entirely

This is the setting worth understanding, because the two options practise opposite things.

Vowels removed leaves the consonant skeleton: b_tt_rfl_. That is nearly always readable, because English carries most of its identity in its consonants — which is why txt spk works. The child recognises the word first and then has to recall which vowels it uses, so this is spelling practice on the part of a word that is hardest to hear.

Consonants removed leaves _u__e_f_y, which is close to unreadable. Now the word cannot be recognised from the fragment, so the child needs the word bank or the context. That makes it a much harder task and a different one — retrieval rather than completion.

Start with vowels. Consonants are for a child who already knows the list.

How many letters go

Set it directly at one, two or three, or leave it on Auto and let the difficulty setting scale it to the length of each word.

On Auto, easy removes about a fifth of the letters with a minimum of one, medium about a third with a minimum of two, and hard about 45% with a minimum of three. Scaling matters because a fixed count treats cat and photosynthesis the same, and removing three letters from a three-letter word leaves nothing to work with. At least one letter always survives, whatever you ask for.

The word bank

On by default, printed at the foot of the page in a scrambled order.

Leave it on for younger children and for any sheet using consonant removal, where the fragments are genuinely unreadable. Turn it off once the list is known, and the sheet stops being a matching exercise and becomes a recall test — the point at which it starts telling you something.

The controls

Your word list, word count up to 20, letters removed, difficulty, which letters to mask, word order (in order or shuffled), the word bank, and the answer key. A4 or US Letter.

Shuffled order is worth using if two children sitting together have the same list.

What it is good for

Spelling, obviously. It is also a low-effort way to revise vocabulary in any subject — a sheet of masked science terms takes thirty seconds to make and does more than reading the glossary again.

And it suits a child who finds a blank page difficult. A word with two letters missing is a much smaller ask than a word to be written from nothing, while still requiring most of the same knowledge.

Print at 100% on A4 or US Letter.