Weekly spelling practice that feels like leveling up

I struggled with spelling for most of my life.

I knew what I wanted to say. I could hear the ideas in my head and feel the story I was trying to tell, but spelling often stood between me and the page. Too often, getting a word wrong felt like proof that I was not smart enough, careful enough, or good enough. It took me years to understand that difficulty with spelling is not a lack of intelligence. Sometimes a learner simply needs another way in.

Now I watch my children learn in a world very different from the one I grew up in. They are gamers. They understand quests, upgrades, inventories, boss battles, crafting systems, respawning, and entire imaginary worlds without needing an instruction manual. Give them a worksheet, and the energy disappears. Give them a mission, and they begin planning.

ReSpell grew from wondering why learning tools so rarely respect that kind of intelligence.

One day, I asked my children to design the games they wished existed. One imagined a financial life game built around earning, budgeting, saving, and surviving an entire year. My other son, T.Rex, had a much more chaotic vision. He wanted a Roblox-style survival adventure with scavenging, fake food, strange creatures, morphs, trading, hazardous places, powers, and a rule that when you failed, you could respawn and choose three items to keep.

It was wonderfully wild. It was also unmistakably his.

Somewhere inside that idea, ReSpell found its heart.

What if a misspelled word did not stop the game? What if it created a glitch in the world? What if the word returned later as a broken bridge, a corrupted supply crate, a locked door, or armor around a weekly boss? What if spelling it correctly caused the object, the reward, or even the player to respawn?

That became the central promise:

Miss it. Respawn. ReSpell.

In ReSpell, mistakes are not dead ends. They create future missions. A child can see a picture, hear a word, type it, write it with a stylus, and eventually encounter it again inside the adventure. Correct spelling powers equipment, repairs the Cyber Base, helps Bit, unlocks rooms, and damages the Glitch Virus. The educational work is real, but it is placed inside a world children may actually want to return to.

I also wanted ReSpell to reflect a broader understanding of language and access. As a CODA and an ASL interpreter, I know language is not experienced through sound and print alone. Children learn through movement, images, patterns, hands, repetition, and connection. ReSpell can grow to include optional visual-language supports, carefully designed fingerspelling practice, picture cues, spoken words, handwriting, and keyboard input. These are not interchangeable forms of language, and ASL is not simply English on the hands. They are different pathways that can help more learners participate.

The goal is not to replace books, pencils, teachers, or traditional practice. It is to add modern tools to the table: an iPad beside the notebook, a game beside the word list, a stylus beside the keyboard, and another chance beside every mistake.

ReSpell began with my own spelling struggle and my children's enormous imaginations. It is being built around T.Rex's dream game, not around an adult's idea of what a learning game should look like.

Because children do not need another worksheet dressed up with points.

They deserve adventures in which learning is their power, mistakes become part of the story, and they can always respawn.