In our seventh post on ICAS 2025, we look at how to prepare for the Spelling Bee paper. Spelling Bee is available for NZ students in years 3 to 8, with sitting dates between 17 to 22 August.
What’s involved in the assessment?
The Spelling Bee assessment looks at a student’s ability to recognise and correct spoken and written vocabulary. The test is for 40 minutes, and the number of questions you have to complete in that time increases with each paper.
Key skills and knowledge
The key skills assessed are:
Spelling is assessed according to four areas of knowledge:
- orthographical (visual features of a word)
- phonological (sound-letter relationships)
- morphemic (building word families)
- etymological (word origins and derivations).
You can see more information on the Spelling Bee paper on the ICAS website here.
Preparation tips
As with all the ICAS Assessments, Spelling Bee is a digital assessment. What’s more, students will need to use the locked-down browser and headphones for the test. See our post on the locked-down browser here.
Technical readiness. Make sure your child’s device passes the technical readiness test and has the latest version of Janison Replay, the locked-down browser, installed. The ICAS website provides a technical readiness test and detailed information on the locked-down browser here.
Practice sample tests online. After setting up the device, locked-down browser and headphones, get your child to practise the digital sample test available on the ICAS website here. This will ensure the technical setup works as intended, and allow your child to be more familiar with the testing environment.
Vocabulary quizzes. Use resources and websites such as vocabulary.com to increase your child’s exposure to a range of vocabulary knowledge, including meaning and pronunciation.
Prefix and suffix practice. Knowledge of the different parts of words improves your child’s ability to decode and infer meaning even if the word is unfamiliar.
Audio and spoken practice. Students need to recognise not just the spelling of a word, but also match the spoken word to the spelling. We suggest practising your child’s ability to recognise spoken vocabulary by dictating to your child and listening to audiobooks and radio or narrated short stories such as Storyberries. Make sure to match the listening activity with following the written words.
Reading widely. As we noted in our post on ICAS English, the greater variety of texts a child explores, the better their understanding of vocabulary is. Encourage your child to read a range of different text types, including fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.
Spelling Bee at Focus Education
Focus Education offers ICAS preparation classes customised to our students’ needs. If you want to find out more about these, please contact us.
If you have registered your child for ICAS with us, keep an eye on your email for notifications, as well as instructions on the day.
We hold our ICAS Assessments in a BYOD (bring-your-own-device) format, which means that your child should be able to prepare for Spelling Bee on the device they will be using in the test. Check the technical readiness of this device via the ICAS website here, download the locked-down browser and test it out before the test day. Also make sure your child also has a pair of headphones for the test.
We wish all students registered for ICAS Spelling Bee the best!
Look out for our last post on preparing for ICAS, ICAS Prep: Maths!
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