NAPLAN Spelling Practice: Year 5

Year 5 NAPLAN spelling tests more complex patterns than Year 3, including -tion and -ture endings (station, fracture), prefix and suffix combinations (careless, hopeful, movement), ie/ei patterns (achieve, receive, ceiling), and silent letters (conscience, subtle, debt). Students are also expected to know tricky high-frequency words like calendar, separate, neighbour, and February, words that are commonly misspelled because their pronunciation does not match their spelling. The stretch words (parliament, exaggerate, rhythm, yacht) test whether students have moved beyond phonics-only strategies to broader word knowledge.

Year 5 moves beyond simple phonics patterns into multi-syllabic words with complex endings, prefix-suffix combinations, and words where the spelling cannot be reliably predicted from pronunciation alone. Where Year 3 focuses on consonant blends and magic-e patterns, Year 5 requires students to know rules like “i before e except after c” (and its exceptions), understand how suffixes change word structure, and recognise words with silent letters. The reach vocabulary (rhythm, yacht, conscience) requires exposure through reading rather than phonics rules.

Focus preparation on the three hardest areas for Year 5: tricky high-frequency words (separate, calendar, February), the ie/ei pattern (achieve, receive, ceiling), and suffix rules (-tion vs -ture endings). Start with Block 3 of this list. Those are the words most commonly misspelled by Year 5 students. Then work through Blocks 1 and 2 to consolidate the pattern-based words, and leave the Stretch 30 for students who are already confident with the core vocabulary. Ten minutes of audio-based practice daily, in the 6 weeks before NAPLAN, produces the most reliable improvement.

No. NAPLAN does not publish its word lists in advance, and the exact words used each year are not released publicly. This is a NAPLAN-style practice list of 100 words compiled to reflect the spelling patterns and vocabulary level expected of Year 5 students. The words are drawn from Australian Curriculum v9.0 expectations and organised by pattern block so students can work through them systematically. Use them as thorough preparation, not as a guarantee of what will appear in the actual test.

The manual approach is to print out the list and tick or cross each word after testing. Keeping track across multiple sessions quickly becomes tedious, and words often slip through the cracks. Lit Spelling handles this automatically. Every word your child gets wrong is flagged as a tricky word and brought back in a later session. Words they have mastered appear less often. There is nothing to maintain. See how it works for more.