SpellingCity Helps You Do More with Less

SpellingCity Helps You Do More with Less

Many teachers are being asked this year to do more with less. Often, the impossible is expected yet nobody is offering teachers much in the way of useful help or tools.

I hope that you recognize SpellingCity as a key to achieving real educational and productivity gains.

Here's where SpellingCity lets you do even more with less:

• vocabulary
• phonics
• writing
• handwriting
• alphabetical order
• spelling

Since SpellingCity keeps adding capabilities, you may not be aware of the full breadth that we provide. Back to school is a great time to review the possibilities. Watch our one minute videos to see what more SpellingCity can do for you.

While we provide SpellingCity for many uses at no charge, we do ask two things of you:

1. Don't keep SpellingCity a secret. Share your enthusiasm for SpellingCity with your colleagues and friends. It’s as easy as forwarding this email, “liking” us on Facebook, or mentioning us in your meetings.
2. If possible, sign up for a SpellingCity Premium Membership. You will be glad you did. At $49.99 for an annual classroom license, it's an insanely great value ($24.99 for a family). Below are the highlights of the current Premium Membership and an inside tip: we will be introducing more great features this year in vocabulary and phonics to simplify your life and to help you and your students. These new materials will only be available to paid-up Premium Members. So get in on the best stuff from the beginning. One teacher told me:

   SpellingCity helped my hardest-to-reach students (ESE, ESL)
   learn vocabulary, phonics, and spelling.

A Premium Membership:

• Automatically tracks student test scores so you don’t have to grade tests or record scores.
• Tracks students' activities on SpellingCity.
• Provides a class gradebook and individual records.
• Enables the Premium Games, LetterFall and SpeedySpeller.
• Allows you to read the students’ writing exercises, respond to them, and keep records, all online! It’s green and efficient.

For funding sources, consider your school budget, the PTA, the class parents or donations via Adopt-a-Classroom. Tens of thousands of teachers keep telling us what a difference SpellingCity has made to them and their students.

General News - We’re up to 48,000 words in our database (we started the last school year with 30,000). You now have the choice of different meanings for about a quarter of the words. Any teacher or parent can write and use a customized sentence for any word. We see teachers creating their own sentences for specific activities. To see how this can be used, here are a few learning reinforcement activities using SpellingCity to teach about honeybees, Florida and nutrition.

SpellingCity is midway through a massive sentence upgrade project. We're adding more context and tightening the wording. As sentences are rewritten, the synthetic voice says them on an interim basis and within two weeks, they're recorded by a human. Please bear with us through the transition.

SpellingCity welcomes you all back to school. Count on us to be a bright spot helping you and your students this year.

My best regards,
John, Mayor of SpellingCity.com
info@spellingcity.com

Hungry for More Learning Games?

Syllables Segmenting Lesson & Game. The combined educational and fun value of this game is astonishing. The Hig Pig Game. I grew up playing this game on road trips with my family. My kids now play it. For those of you who don’t know what a Hig Pig is, it’s a word puzzle game where the answers are two rhyming one-syllable words. For instance, what is a hig pig for an overweight feline? Answer: a fat cat. There are also higgy piggies where the answers are two words each with two syllables. For example: What do you call a crab-like creature involved in organized crime? A mobster lobster! (PS. My daughter made that one up!)
These math fact games can help your youngster learn and practice basic math operations. LearningGamesForKids.com just added games for learning about the states with a page devoted to each of the 50 states. I love trying to match each State with its Nickname. Do you know which state is the Beehive State? The First State? These keyboarding games build your students' skills and speed for this 21st Century skill.
	Time4Learning.com is a great back-to-school skills sharpener for students, K-8.
	Time4Writing’s courses can help students build their writing skills for the new school year. These online writing tutorials take eight weeks or less.