Typos

3/27/20

With the recent Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), many children are at home because schools are closed. Education and fun, however, should not stop. Here is a spreadsheet I created that gets kids working on identifying typos, or words that are spelled incorrectly.

First, you can copy/paste many words into a single column. I searched the web for things like words for 1^st grade, words for 2^nd grade, etc. Of course, feel free to enter in any words you want!

For purposes of this spreadsheet, I define a "typo" to be a correctly spelled word that has one letter inserted, substituted, or deleted. For example, if the correctly spelled word is "fungus", then an insertion could be "funguus", a substitution could be "fungis", and a deletion could be "fngus".

You set the frequency of words to have insertions, substitutions, and deletions. The spreadsheet randomly samples from your big list of words, and using your frequencies, creates versions with an insertion, substitution, or a deletion, or leaves the word as is. The insertions, substitutions, and deletions are done at random positions in the words. The letters that are being inserted or substituted in the words are randomly selected from the alphabet (this list can also be edited to exclude certain odd letters like x and z, for example, that may make a typo too obvious).

I set the Print Area, that is, the area that will be printed out when you click Print, to be the area with the words in the outlined box. This way, you can just open up the spreadsheet and print, and you're good to go.

Click here to download the spreadsheet.

If you find this spreadsheet useful, please credit Statisticool.com. Thanks for reading.