We often hear from school and education leaders: What we really need help with is improving our teaching human capital… Our teachers need a lot of help to teach science and science inquiry, especially at the younger grades. At our
Providing Successful PD to your Teachers
Note that this post highlights one of VocabularySpellingCity’s sisters: Science4Us. It is an early elementary science program. Increasingly, principals and superintendents are asking us to help develop their teachers. We have always provided professional development to support our products but
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
Vocabulary Memory Match: Mix It UP!
The new Vocabulary Memory Match game from VocabularySpellingCity engages the students because it really mixes it up. It blends a classic simple gameplay with some complex concepts of what makes a match. It really makes them think. It is one
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
Silly Bulls, Penguins, and Roaches! Oh my! Halloween 2017 flew by!
#HappyHalloween2017 🎃👻 pic.twitter.com/ABCm2pDlmt — SpellingCity (@SpellingCity) October 31, 2017 Halloween is all about sweet treats and creative costumes. This year at VocabularySpellingCity, we challenged the team to get into the Halloween spirit by dressing up as a characters from our
Any Port in a Storm: Learning English Idioms
Now that Hurricane Irma has past, I’m riding home to Ft Lauderdale. VocabularySpellingCity is headquartered in South Florida so we shut the office last week and everyone scurried like ants to safety. In my case, my “port” was a dog-friendly
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.