The original of this article is available on the WritingCity website! WritingCity is an elementary writing program which has been popular due to its ease of use. Teachers like the day by day lesson plans and the support by the
Our Phonics Patent
Even as we rolled out SpellingCity, teachers and literacy coaches asked us to do more with helping students with sounds. They asked us to convert the games to focus not just on spelling practice but on practice activities for recognizing
Posting Educational Standards
I love visiting elementary school classrooms and when I do, I check out the environment. Every classroom now seems to post the educational goals for the week. They post for each subject. They post at four depths of knowledge. And
VocabularySpellingCity Speaks with an Australian Accent!
For years, VocabularySpellingCity has been popular in Australia and New Zealand. Despite the heavy usage and rave reviews for VocabularySpellingCity from Down Under, there has been some annoyance regarding our accent. The fact is that our 50,000 sentences were all
Sound Counter: Building Literacy Foundational Skills
Sound Counter is designed to build student success on key foundational skills, Sound Counter is a creative approach to helping build these skills. Students are presented with a word and asked to count the sounds. For example, a student might
Which Letter Team?
Happy New Year and to celebrate, VocabularySpellingCity has provided several new learning games to its Premium Member. These learning games provide unique benefits to schools, teachers, and students in building foundational, phonics, and vocabulary skills. Because of their flexibility, high
Improving Reading Comprehension through Vocabulary Retention
Vocabulary is responsible for 70% of reading comprehension problems in elementary schools. And while the research is clear on what most students require to build vocabulary (12 spaced multimodal encounters with a word), many schools ignore the research and reading scores suffer.
Our Journey to VocabularySpellingCity
SpellingCity’s Journey to VocabularySpellingCity At VocabularySpellingCity, we went through a transition, moving from being a spelling program to one focused on vocabulary building and reading comprehension. Here’s our story from the beginning. I had a few goals in 2010 when I was starting SpellingCity, as I
Elementary Students: Owning the Learning
One of the brightest trends that I see in education today is a broad nationwide move to have students own their learning and to adopt a growth mindset. I’m particularly encouraged to see that this is a distinct trend in elementary schools. In
Students: Creating Lists, Owning Learning
Everyone would like it if students took more “ownership” of their learning. Students would like it, and so would parents and teachers. VocabularySpellingCity makes it easy to give students more accountability for their own learning. Once they’ve chosen a book