Aim2Spell Learning Game, A Mega Hit. What else do you want?
Have you ever thought, VocabularySpellingCity would be more useful to me if….?
Well, there’s no reason to keep your thoughts to yourself!
What is it that you would like us to add or change on VocabularySpellingCity? WritingCity? Science4Us? Or if you have a need for another edtech product, please share your thoughts in the comments below. Or tweet me:
Please share your thoughts with us and I’ll promise to give your ideas a real think on our side. It would help if you explained a little bit about who you are and why you think it would be useful.
Here’s a few categories of ideas to think about:
More Learning Games – Always Popular
Enhance the Phonics – Many teachers are excited about the phonics practice games introduced in 2014 and 2015 and are asking for more features for building phonological and phonics skills.
Improved Student UI – Some teachers and parents have complained that the web-based student login is not that attractive and a little tricky to navigate, especially for the younger ones. They prefer the one on the iPad and Android.
I have ALWAYS thought that Spelling City would be more entertaining if you had some multiplayer games. Racing against other players (not just com) to see who can spell the word first or other related topics might be fun. Don’t you think? You should have an area just for kids, the Word Watch Tower or something like that. A kind-of, home base to put the games in. Instead of that old games list. (no offence, it’s very well made, it’s just not fun enough.) You could have two clubhouse pages, one for Premium members and one for the non-premium members. One clubhouse will have the Premium games in it whilst the other clubhouse shall have the non-premium games in it. It needs BRIGHT colors in it. The clubhouses should have differetn rooms as well. One room for the games, a room for the printables, a room for the dictionary, a word bank, the kids can find words they like and they can make their own words list. With catergories too! (robots talking :-)!) “Hello, what type of word are looking for? Sad words? Happy words? The word of the day is BLOB, would you like me to bring it, and all of the other words like BLOB up? Very well then, i shall get on that very thing right away!” And finally, a room just for the little munchkin spellers! With lots of pastel colors and stuffed animals that teach you new words like, (little stuffed dog talking. Aww, so cute:-)!) “Mommy! (the dog will be enthusiastic about learning new words with the little children, yay!) M-O-M-M-Y, mommy! We can spell! Great job!” Well I’m sorry I took so long explaining my ideas. I just have SOOOO many of them! You WILL be hearing from me later on with MORE ideas (lol,)! Thank you so much for taking time to read my VERY long suggestions. I hope that you enjoy them very much and that they are in a way, enlighting to all of Spelling City, Goodye!
Love,
Abigail H. 🙂
Abigail, Thanks so much for your ideas. This week we added three new games which we have been working on a for a very long time so we’re thinking along similar lines.
http://www.spellingcity.com/which-initial-sound.html This game builds a basic phonics skills, phonological awareness, by having students practice identifying the very first sound in words. This is the first picture game for VocabularySpellingCity
http://www.spellingcity.com/which-final-sound.html Much like Which Initial Sound? but this focuses on the final sound.
http://www.spellingcity.com/Games/sentence-unscramble.html Now with the Sentence Slope Option!
Hi everybody! Something’s I think that we can improve about Spelling city is that you can have a chat with your friends and a daily challenge maybe?😬😋I hope you consider this?
Sincerely,
Aditi😋
I so consider it.
Hi,
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I also think that we should be able to have a daily chat with our friends!
One thing that spelling city needs to improve on is…
when ever you are do spelling city in the middle of a game we should be able to have a multieplayer and chat.I hope you agree!
In my opinion I think that over holidays we should not have any spelling city.Why?Because people could go on vacations and not have any time at all to do or to complete our asingments.We should also be able to spend time with our families.
I would love it if you can add an option to have sentences read to the student if you choose. My kiddos are younger (Kinder and 1st grade). Some of the sentences are too advanced for them, as are some of the games. It would also be helpful if you could create some easier games for the younger students. My girls are using this mainly for sight words and spelling. There are some games they cannot play by themselves because the games are a little too advanced or they do not know all the words to read the definitions, etc.
Lynn, I’m not entirely sure what you mean. Have you looked at FlashCards where you can hear each sentence read?
Make the games quicker!!! It’s annoying to have to take all that time for one game!
A few suggestions. I think you should be allowed to do the activities out of sequence. Some of the activities (squash the bugs, for example) take a very long time, and far exceed the normal recommended homework time allowance.
I think this site would be more fun if there were more colors and fun games to play against your friends when you are done. Maybe try and not have the computer repeate every letter your mouse goes over.
Thank you!
– Ava Schulz
Would it be possible to make the Word-O-Pillar a little easier by not having to put the letter exactly in the blue lines…would save a lot of frustration.
Thanks,
Rebecca
Rebecca, this is is great feedback. We’ll take a look at it. We actually spend a great deal of time on fine tuning this sort of usability issue so I understand exactly what you mean.
Please tell me how I can cancel my old membership as a former teacher. Now, I am a homeschool parent, I want to sign up my boys, but your site doesn’t seem to have a link for canceling.
Darlene, There’s no need to cancel since there is no recurring billing or subscriptions. Once you pay, you are paid up for an entire year. If you have an account that you would like to convert from school to personal, you should email support or use the “contact us” page on VocabularySpellingCity. Btw, there are a number of xteachers that I’ve met that are now homeschooling.
I have been working with spelling city but in the last vocabulary list I wanted to do the spelling test and it didn´t open. I tried several times logging out and in, and it didn´t work.
Can you help me please
Hi – this is a membership problem, which you probably won’t need to post.
We (Trinity Grammar School, Summer Hill, Australia) are members – I renewed the membership on March 24, 2016. However, one of the users (Fiona Daniels) has had two “your account is about to expire” emails – the first from Libby early in May, the second from Robert last week. I’ve responded to both emails but haven’t heard back, so on Friday I used the Contact email on the site. Still no reply.
I suspect it’s Fiona’s old account which may be about to expire, not the renewed one, to which we made a few changes, but I’d really like this confirmed or clarified.
Thanks in anticipation,
Paula
We are a high school special ed class. We use spelling city worksheets with our students because we have limited access to computers. When printing some of the “games” this week the tops of the the letters look “chopped off”. On the ones that where the print is smaller it is tolerable, but on the Alphabetize and other worksheets, it makes the sheet unusable. Help!
Did you email [email protected] or use their “contact us” Page? If not, I’ll forward this and they can get back to you. The printables do get checked but we’ll recheck.
Mary Kelly, I’m so sorry. If you could email the ones that don’t look right, we’ll fix it.
I am a homeschool teacher of 3. Can I use Spelling City with the homeschool curriculum that I use? Is it free or is there a fee?
Deirdre,
This is both a free version of VocabularySpellingCity and a Premium or paid version.
The free version is ample if you just want to work on your students’ spelling and use the test and about 8 games.
But, the really valuable educational materials are for premium members. There is a lot of help with vocabulary, phonics, and writing. Students can create their own lists. There are much better games. And for your whole family, it’s only $35/year. (Discounts are available if you are a Time4Learning member through their parent login)>
How can I print the graded spelling tests so that they are in alphabetical order? There is no order in how to print them. Please help!!!
It would be great to be able to add a dictated sentences opportunity on our Spelling City Test Me assessments.
A teacher or parent when setting up a list, can create an original sentence. But it’s not dicated, it must be typed in.
We have thought about creating a spelling type dictation activity where an entire paragraph is read to the students and they have to type it in correctly. Personally, as the mayor of vocabularyspellingcity, I would love this since I learned this way. But them, I also want to build in diagramming sentences. But best practices these days are not in this direction so we have not provided it.
I would really like the option to remove some of the non-spelling related games (rhyme time especially) because they do not help with learning the actual spelling of the words.
It would be great to add our own online dictionary as reference.
I am trying to make lists for my kids but most of the words are not available in spelling city. I have to manually add definition,parts of speech etc. from online dictionary like merriam webster etc.
Hop you can look into this
I would like to be able to share my assignments from the site to my google classroom. Enabling that integration would help students navigate better and bring them right to correct assignment.
I am noticing on the sound counter, you are putting sounds that should be separate together. For instance, in the word “your”, it is telling my k students it has 2 sounds when it has 3… /y/ /o/ /r/. The ou are saying the long o sound~ or is 2 sounds. The same with “for” , the sound counter is grouping the or as one sound when it is 2.
Thank you and sorry to be so picky!
Heather, This is a valid but controversial point. The systems for categorizing and portraying the phonemes or sounds in English are a topic of much debate. Some argue about how granular we should be in distinguishing sounds. Some argue that that 44 sounds is too few, it’s really 51. The system we implemented is sort of a consensus view although I wouldn’t won’t to debate any of the details including your point which has relates in part to the treatment of R controlled vowels. It’s always a judgement call. Our focus was on simplifying the portrayal of sound-letter correspondence, not on refining or even distilling what the categories of sounds are. I would love to return to focus on that. I would also love to work on machine recognition of those sounds and to give good feedback to young readers of whether they are correctly saying the sounds.