Year 6 Spelling Rules & Word List for KS2 SATs

How Spelling Is Tested

The spelling test happens on Monday of SATs week. A teacher reads out 20 sentences, each with a missing word. Your child hears the sentence, then writes the missing word in a gap on their answer sheet.

Every word is worth one mark. There’s no half marks for nearly-right spellings. “Accomodate” gets zero — it has to be “accommodate” with two c’s and two m’s. That’s why knowing the tricky bits of each word matters so much.

The Statutory Word List

Year 5 and 6 share a list of about 100 words that children are expected to spell correctly. These turn up in the spelling test and in writing assessments. Some of the trickiest:

Your child doesn’t need to memorise the entire list in one go. Five words a day, tested at the end of the week, is plenty. By SATs week they’ll have covered the lot several times over.

Spelling Rules That Help

English spelling is messy, but there are patterns. These rules cover a big chunk of the words your child will meet:

• i before e except after c — receive, ceiling, believe, chief. But watch out for weird, seize, and protein. The exceptions trip everyone up.
• Doubling consonants — running, swimming, beginning. If a short vowel comes before a single consonant, double it when adding -ing or -ed.
• Dropping the e — hope → hoping, make → making. Drop the silent e before a suffix that starts with a vowel.
• Changing y to i — happy → happiness, beauty → beautiful. If the letter before the y is a consonant, change y to i before adding the suffix.

The trick isn’t memorising rules word for word. It’s spotting the pattern when they see a new word. “Oh, it ends in e, so I drop it before -ing.” That kind of thinking is what SATs rewards.

Prefixes

Prefixes go at the start of a word to change its meaning: un-, dis-, mis-, re-, pre-, anti-, auto-. The golden rule? They don’t change the spelling of the root word. You just stick them on the front.

Here’s what catches them out: the double letters. When a prefix ends with the same letter the root starts with, you get two of them. Children often drop one because it looks wrong. It isn’t.

Suffixes

Suffixes are trickier than prefixes because they do sometimes change the root word. The big ones for Year 6:

• -tion vs -sion — Most words use -tion (action, fiction, addition). Use -sion when the root ends in d, de, s, se, or t (expand → expansion, tense → tension).
• -ment, -ness, -ful, -less — Usually just add them: enjoy → enjoyment, kind → kindness, hope → hopeful, care → careless.
• -ous — fame → famous (drop the e), courage → courageous (keep the e before -ous because of the soft g).
• -ible vs -able — There’s no reliable rule here, honestly. Visible, possible, terrible use -ible. Comfortable, reasonable, enjoyable use -able. Your child just has to learn which is which.

The -ible/-able split is one of the hardest things in Year 6 spelling. If your child gets these right, they’re doing brilliantly.

Homophones

Homophones sound the same but are spelt differently. They come up in SATs every single year. These are the ones your child absolutely must know:

• there / their / they’re — there (place), their (belonging to them), they’re (they are).
• to / too / two — to (direction), too (also / excessive), two (the number).
• your / you’re — your (belonging to you), you’re (you are).
• its / it’s — its (belonging to it), it’s (it is). See our punctuation guide for more on this one.
• affect / effect — affect is the verb, effect is the noun. “The rain will affect the match.” “The effect was dramatic.”
• practice / practise — practice is the noun, practise is the verb. “I need more practice.” “I must practise my spelling.”

A quick test: if your child can substitute “they are” and the sentence still works, it’s “they’re”. If not, it’s one of the other two. Same trick works for you’re/your and it’s/its.

How to Learn Tricky Spellings

Staring at a word list doesn’t work. Here’s what does:

• Look, say, cover, write, check — the classic method. It works because your child has to recall the word from memory, not just copy it.
• Break it into syllables — Wed-nes-day, Feb-ru-ary, Sep-ar-ate. Saying each syllable out loud helps children spot the silent or tricky bits.
• Mnemonics — “a piece of pie” for piece. “Big Elephants Can Always Understand Small Elephants” for because. Silly ones stick best.
• Find the word within the word — there’s “iron” in environment, “finite” in definite.

Practise five words a day. Little and often beats cramming every time. By the time SATs week arrives, your child will have seen each word dozens of times.

SATs Arcade has hundreds of GPS spelling questions with instant feedback, so your child can practise the statutory word list and common spelling patterns without the stress of a formal test.