1. This sentence has ONE spelling mistake:
"The baby was restliss for most of the night."
Type the correct spelling of the misspelt word.
ICAS Spelling Paper C (Year 5)
Paper C is sat by Year 5 students. Same size as Paper B — 45 questions in 40 minutes, the same four kinds of question — with harder words and harder rules.
Last updated: 5 October 2026
What Year 5 brings
Unstressed vowels. This is the level where words like separate, definite and category arrive, and where the vowel you cannot hear is the one that decides the mark. Sounding a word out stops working, and children who have relied on that method meet the limit of it here.
Suffixes that change the base word. Not just adding -ly or -ness, but what happens to happy when it becomes happiness, or argue when it becomes argument. The rules and conventions questions ask about these directly.
The skill that separates results
Knowing when a word looks wrong even when it sounds right. By Year 5 the proofreading questions are full of words that are phonetically plausible and orthographically wrong — seperate, definately, arguement. A child who checks spelling by sound will read straight past them.
The fix is visual: seeing the correct form often enough that the wrong one looks strange.
Where Year 5 students lose marks
- Unstressed vowels, per above
- Correcting questions where the child fixes the wrong word in the sentence, because two look suspicious
- Rules questions that ask about a pattern rather than a word, which is a more abstract task than it looks
A note on dictation
In the real test, the dictated words are played through headphones. Our Paper C practice opens with them, so your child will need headphones or the sound turned on.
What the mark will look like
ICAS marks run lower than school tests by design. The paper keeps stretching students well past year level, so a result that looks disappointing on a school scale can be a strong ICAS result — read it against the distribution rather than as a percentage.
How to prepare for Paper C
Keep a short list of the words your child gets wrong and look at them, rather than writing them out ten times. At this level the useful memory is visual, not motor.
Common questions
Which year level sits ICAS Paper C?
Year 5. ICAS names its papers by letter rather than by year — Paper A is Year 3 and Paper F is Year 8 — so a Year 5 student sits Paper C.
How long is Spelling Paper C?
45 questions in 40 minutes.
Does writing words out ten times help?
Less than looking at them. At this level the useful memory is visual rather than motor, so a short list of the words your child actually gets wrong, looked at often, does more than repetition.
Year 5 also sits: Maths Paper C · English Paper C · Science Paper C
Sample questions
Try each one first, then open the answer and worked solution under it.
Answer and worked solution
Correct answer: restless
The suffix is -less, spelt l-e-s-s.
It is added straight onto rest.
That gives restless.
'restless' is the correct spelling.
2. Which word completes the sentence?
"He cut his on a sharp stone."
Answer and worked solution
Correct answer: B
Your heel is the back part of your foot.
To heal is to get better after being hurt.
The sentence is about cutting part of the foot, so heel is the one.
'heel' is the correct word.
3.
Nail the blank to the back fence.
Press play and listen for the missing word.
The recording plays when your child practises.
Answer and worked solution
Correct answer: board
The sentence needs 'board'.
A board is a flat piece of timber; bored means having nothing interesting to do.
The full sentence: "Nail the board to the back fence."
The word is 'board'.
Practise free, no account needed. Every paper is marked the moment your child finishes, with a worked solution on every question.
Free practice draws from a limited set of questions, so some will repeat. Subscribers get the full question bank and fewer repeats.
Related papers: Spelling Paper B (Year 4) · Spelling Paper D (Year 6)
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