Missing Letter Generator

What this actually tests

Where you put the blanks decides what the exercise measures, and the three useful settings are genuinely different:

• Vowels blanked tests phonics — whether the pupil can hear the word and map the sound to a letter.
• Middle letters blanked, first and last protected tests the orthographic patterns that trip English learners up: doubled consonants, silent letters, -ough and its relatives.
• Random positions, nothing protected is the hardest, and closest to a recall test. Best for revision of words already met.

Watch for ambiguous prompts

Short words with the same shape produce prompts with more than one right answer — c_t is CAT, COT and CUT. A pupil who writes a different valid word has not made a spelling error, and marking it wrong teaches the wrong thing. The tool flags these before you print; the fix is usually to protect one more position or to blank a different letter.

Other ways to drill the same list

A scramble worksheet tests recall of letter order rather than letter identity, and a word search tests recognition, which is the gentlest of the three. Running the same spelling list through all three across a week gives you three genuinely different exercises rather than the same one three times.