The idea was simple: We wanted to treat words like “tooth” as three blocks of letters which correspond with the three sounds: T, OO, and TH. But, as we searched, we could NOT find a system which mapped the sounds in words to the way the words are spelled. At first, this seemed unbelievable. Surely, in some university or research center, somebody had created a mapping which connected all the common English words into their sounds and mapped those sounds to the letters used to spell the words.

We spoke to a lot of people which  confirmed our initial findings. This mapping did not exist. Dictionaries, for instance, routinely have a phonetic spelling of words using various systems for writing phonics. But none of the dictionaries mapped the sounds back to the actual spelling of the words. Nobody had ever done this.

Our vision came from watching endless tutors, teachers, and parents help students by pointing at a few letters in a word and having the student say the sounds that those letters created. We watched teachers help students read the sounds to decode the word and then blend them together to write them.  

So, we decided to create the VocabularySpellingCity Phonics system, a novel contribution to literacy. The phonics system can be used for building a variety of prereading phonics-related skills including phonological skills, phonemic awareness, and spelling skills. Since we knew we had created something original and valuable, we started talking to lawyers. We decided in 2015 to file for a patent on our original system.  We started with two provisional patent filings.

Our permanent patent is number 10,387,543, issued on August 20th, 2019. It’s called a “Phoneme-to-Grap

Click for simple demo

hemes Mapping Patent”. It’s a utility patent covering our original method for algorithmically mapping the sounds in English words to the letters. The patent grant is both a recognition of novelty, a recognition of usefulness, and a grant of intellectual property ownership.

What is Phoneme to Grapheme Mapping?

Phonemes are the basic sounds of the English language.  Examples of phonemes from the word “cheek”, would be: CH, EE, K.   

Graphemes are the use of letters to express these sounds.  In English, here are three different patterns of how sounds (phonemes) are expressed by letters (graphemes):

1. Some sounds are created by a single letter, for example, the T is “ten”.  T almost always sounds the same (unless it’s in a combination with another letter like H).
2. Some sounds such as the long E sound can be spelled a number of ways including a double E, an E followed by an A, an E followed by a consonant followed by an E which is at the end of a word, a y at the end of the word, and an EY at the end of the word.
3. Some letters, like the S, can usually sound one way, like in sound, and sometimes sounds quite different, like in sugar (where it makes the SH sound)

So how can this technology help?

Students can hear and see the sounds by mousing over the sounds in each box of VocabularySpellingCity’s Interactive Phonics Boxes. Many classrooms have students first work on recognizing the initial sounds where the Sounds Boxes are used with images to match initial sounds.

The patent holders who are current VocabularySpellingCity employees are John Edelson, Obiora Obinyeluaku. and Kris Craig.  For commercial purposes, the patent belongs to VocabularySpellingCity.

Holders of Patent 10,387,543 (current employees)

Activities with Interactive Sound Boxes (that use this technology): Sound It Out,  Initial Sound Speller, Final Sound Speller,  FlashCards, Word Study (available for logged-in students) and TeachMe More.

Sound-Based Activities for Phonological  and Phonics Skill Development:  Which Initial Sound?, Which Final Sound?, Initial Sound Speller, Final Sound Speller,  SillyBulls, Sound It Out, FlashCards, Word

Click to Hear the Sounds

Study and TeachMe More.

John Edelson at the US Patent Office

The Sound Counter Helps Students Focus on Distinguishing Sounds, Building Phonological Awareness

A huge problem for teachers in 21st Century classrooms is the mechanics of rostering all the digital programs that students will use. Just getting students’ names into the system is a hassle. Even after setting up a class list, teachers are tasked with helping students log in each day and adding new students throughout the school year.  Managing tech tools ends up becoming troublesome and time-consuming.

A not-so-quick-fix some teachers opt for is creating large poster boards or sets of 3 by 5 index cards with all the app usernames and passwords, but there’s a much simpler solution to this dilemma: Google Classroom! 

VocabularySpellingCity is pleased to announce that in addition to Clever, Schoology, Canvas, and Google’s traditional SSO solution, we now support the Google Classroom solution.

Now when adding students under the “My Students” tab, teachers can simply select “Google Import,” and voila! All students are immediately rostered into the system. New students? No worries! As new students arrive during the year and are added to Google Classroom, they are automatically synced into VocabularySpellingCity.

Teachers are enjoying our new user-friendly updates that simplify the rostering process.

The updates are clear and well organized. – Ms. Ruffcorn

Our team at VocabularySpellingCity continues to provide teachers and their students with great research-based education, solid fun educational content, and streamlined workflow so teachers can focus on teaching and students can focus on learning.

It is one of the five new games just launched:

• Sort It Out Vowels
• Which Letter Team?
• Sound Counter
• Word Counter
• Vocabulary Memory Match

The gameplay is simple enough. It’s the classic memory match game where a student flips over a pair of cards trying to find pairs that match. Usually, the pairing is that the words or pictures are identical. But with VocabularySpellingCity’s Vocabulary Memory Match, there are four different ways to make a pair. A word can be paired with its picture, definition, antonym, or synonym.

For instance, the word go would be matched by the green light on a traffic light.  Makes you think, right?

Here’s a case where the match for condition is the synonym of shape.

Vocabulary Memory Match includes a video mini-lesson.Teachers may use the game’s mini-lesson video during direct instruction. Before the game begins, students view a brief overview of antonyms (words that are opposites) and synonyms (words that are similar). If students are still confused about the concepts, they will be able to watch a video mini-lesson on antonyms and synonyms.

This learning game can be paired with content-area vocabulary, like the 2nd Grade Science – Animals word list, or literary vocabulary, like the 7th Grade Literature Call of the Wild word list.

For more on vocabulary instruction, check out our quick breakdown of different vocabulary topics and strategies here.

The audio and visual features of Vocabulary Memory Match are perfect for English Language Learners. ELL students may not know everyday language, like bunny or flower. Vocabulary Memory Match uses images to help ELLs with concrete word meanings. ELLs can practice commonplace English vocabulary by matching words with a visual.

First up: Which Letter Team?

Which Letter Team?

This new game starts by explaining one of the basic and most confusing concepts in phonics.  Often, multiple letters team up to make a single sound.  The examples that the game uses of multiple letters teaming up are SH and TCH.  Here’s the examples of letter teams. Notice that it illustrates letter teams both at the start and in the middle of words.

This is an illustration of exactly what the gameplay looks like.  The voice over has asked the student to pick the correct spelling for the word rain.  There are four choices of how to spell the word by filling in the missing sound. The student can hear the word again by mousing over it. And the students can hear the sounds of the difference choices as much as they want. In some cases, the choices include another way to make the sound. In this case, the sound is the long A sound so an alternative that might have appeared (but didn’t in this case) was AY which is the spelling of a long A sound as in day or pay.

This last image is what the student sees after they have successfully picked the right choice. Notice that one of the distractors on this list was another way of spelling a long E.

Which Letter Team? is one of the five new games in January 2018. The other four are:

• Sort It Out Vowels
• Sound Counter
• Word Counter
• Vocabulary Memory Match

Which Letter Team brings the fun to phonics lessons, making challenging phonics topics such as digraphs, consonant blends, and vowels more fun for students.

Stay tuned for descriptions of these other new games (or review them yourselves) and remember that they join an already very strong suite of phonological and phonics skill building games at VocabularySpellingCity

Sound It Out: Letter-Sound Correspondence. These games allow any word to immediately be available to students with the sound-letter correspondence available so they hear and see it as much as they like!

January 2018 Update:  Five new reading foundation skills games just launched in addition to Sound It Out:

• Sort It Out Vowels
• Which Letter Team?
• Sound Counter
• Word Counter
• Vocabulary Memory Match

These phonics games are all based on VocabularySpellingCity’s revolutionary technology which enables student to hear and see the sound to letter patterns that are too often a major stumbling block to learning to read! You can pair these new games with our phonics word lists that target important phonics topics such as consonant blends, vowels, and digraphs.

Sound It Out: The Game

VocabularySpellingCity is broadly used in upper elementary grades (over 10% in the US!) and now has added Sound It Out, which strengthens our offering for primary grades. Sound It Out uses the Interactive Sound Boxes, a powerful learning tool invaluable to primary grade teachers and, not incidentally, to all levels of English Language Learners.

I’m writing about Sound It Out since it illustrates some of my deepest held beliefs about learning. Direct instruction plays a very minor role in student learning. Hands-on learning experiences and meaningful practice are far more important. The Sound It Out game is a rich skill-building exercise which puts interactive learning tools into students’ and teachers’ hands in an unprecedented way. Students can now, on any list of words that the teacher or student chooses, have rich phonological and phonics practice. Sound It Out breaks any word down into its sounds (phonemes) and then shows the letter-sound correspondence.

Students who are struggling to understand letter-sound correspondence can mouse over the sounds in their words to HEAR each sound and SEE which letter combinations make which sounds.

Which Initial Sound?

In terms of game play, Sound It Out starts is a sound-based unscramble game where students can choose from two scenes –  a version that features a fun cat and mouse and classic version geared toward older students.  But let’s focus first on the educational concept. Words on the selected list are automatically broken into sounds with corresponding letter combinations.  So if your list includes tooth, ship, sheep, chill, and this; each of these words would be used in the activity broken down by sounds:  t oo th,  sh i p, sh ee p, ch i ll, and th i s.  In the unscramble part for each word, the student must reassemble the word based on its sounds. This encourages the student to focus not only on the spelling of the word, but on the sounds each letter (or letter combination) makes.

Here’s an example with the word “black”. The word is broken down into its four sounds: b l a ck and then the order is scrambled. The student hears: “Click on the sound blocks in the right order to spell the word: black.” Students also have the option to hear the word read again or and in a sentence.

If the student mouses over the b, the student hears the /b/ sound. Mouse-overs on the other tiles also play their sounds;  the student hears a short /a/, a /ck/ sound, and an /l/. If the student clicks on the right sound, it slides into place and the game asks for the next sound, If the student clicks on the wrong sound, the game gently corrects, explains again what sound  to look for, and the student again searches for the right sound.

Here’s the part of the game that I feel is most magical. After the student has successful assembled the sounds of the word, the letter tiles transform into the the word fully assembled but still broken down into phonics tiles. The word is read aloud again and sounded out, with each Interactive Sound Box being highlighted for the sound being read. The student can also mouse over each sound to highlight the Interactive Sound Box while listening to the pronunciation. These interactive phonics boxes are a powerful tool for students trying to learn to recognize the sounds and then match them with the letter combinations.

Lets look for a second at these VocabularySpellingCity interactive sound boxes.  Click to play Sound It Out and get a feel for how it puts the ability to explore sound letters combinations in the students’ hands. You can do it on your computer, tablet, or phone.

While I have focused on Sound It Out for primary students that are learning letter sounds and phonics, it is also useful students learning English.

For English Language Learners, Sound It Out is exceptionally useful.  As background, we all know that one of the challenges for ELL students is mastering the phonological skills of distinguishing the sounds (both for hearing and for speaking) that exist in English but not in their original languages. For instance, native Spanish speakers need to learn to distinguish the English /v/ from the /b/ sound.  Other English sounds that are difficult for native Spanish speakers include the /l/ sound, the short /i/, and the /ch/ sound. But with Sound It Out, these tough sounds can be listened to and practiced, sound by sound, giving them the power to pursue proficiency.

English Sounds that Challenge Spanish Speakers

These interactive sound boxes are based on a novel technology developed by VocabularySpellingCity. It is a patent pending technology called “Phoneme-to-grapheme mapping systems and methods.”

The high-power at low-cost of this framework is ground-breaking: other vendors sell a similar capability but only for the words that they’ve analyzed, not for a large library of words and they price it at a whopping $25 to $50 per student per year, VocabularySpellingCity provides it at $2.25 per student per year (for schools).

Primary Grade Activities – I’ve been asked to add a quick overview of what activities use these Interactive Sound Boxes and more generally, what activities the primary grade teachers should focus on.

Which Initial Sound

Activities with Interactive Sound Boxes: Sound It Out,  Initial Sound Speller, Final Sound Speller,  FlashCards, Word Study (available for logged-in students) and TeachMe More.

Activities with pictures for many of the words: FlashCards, Word Study and TeachMe More.

Sound-Based Activities for Phonological  and Phonics Skill Development:  Which Initial Sound?, Which Final Sound?, Initial Sound Speller, Final Sound Speller,  SillyBulls, Sound It Out, FlashCards, Word Study and TeachMe More.

These activities are also particularly well-suited to the primary grades:  Read-A-Word, Alphabetize, Word Unscramble, Missing Letter, Audio Word Match and Printable Handwriting Practice.

Click to Hear the Sounds

Once they’ve chosen a book or a study topic, ask them to identify some key vocabulary. They should pick words that they don’t understand, words that they like, or words that they think their classmates might like to learn. Have them create their own list on VocabularySpellingCity. It’s easy! A teacher (or parent) with a Premium Membership can navigate to List Management and click on “Allow Students to Create Lists” to enable the Student Lists feature.

Enabling Student Ownership of Learning

Once a teacher has enabled Student Lists, logged-in students will see this menu option for creating their own lists. (BTW, we recently did a round of meetings with teachers and we were surprised to hear how many teachers had not seen the student interface, which is gorgeous. Teachers, to take a look, log in to VocabularySpellingCity, go to My Students, and click “Login as” next to any student’s name.)

How Students Create Lists

The student then enters a name for the list and enters his words. Once the list has been saved, the student can edit the list, selecting different usages for the words, if available. These words can be used by the student in any of our 35+ learning games or activities. The teacher can import the student’s list and share it with other students, which is particularly fun since the student now gets to help his classmates with their learning too.

Words About Planets

It’s that simple. VocabularySpellingCity’s Student Lists feature provides a way for students to show leadership for their own education as well as for of their peers’ education. Enjoy! In fact, tell us what you think of Student Lists. There’s a comment section below or tweet to me at @VSpellCityMayor.  Thanks.

And what a fun day it was! My name is Sam, and I’m a new employee here at VocabularySpellingCity and Science4Us. I was especially excited to experience this day as a group leader and attend all the stations, because I would be discovering new things right along with the kids.

At 10 a.m., the school bus arrived. The students bounded out and split into groups. I was happy to pair with a great group of 5th graders and their teacher, Mrs. Rivera.

Somerset students got a chance to show their silly side with props at the photo both, posing with VocabularySpellingCity mascot HangMouse and Science4Us mascot Sciefus.

“We’ll meet computer engineers, right? I really want to meet them!” One boy exclaimed between handfuls of Goldfish crackers.

“Yes, we will,” I assured. First we stopped at the photo booth to take group pictures with funny props and stuffed toy versions of our animated characters, Sciefus and HangMouse.

It was time to begin. I opened the door to our office, and watched the kids grow calm and quiet as they took in the professional environment. Their eyes widened as they navigated the maze of swivel chairs and monitors, amazed to see an office in real life.

“We’re going to walk by people on the phone with clients, so we have to stay very quiet!” I whispered, and they nodded seriously. Watching them tiptoe past my co-workers so carefully made me realize that just the experience of spending time in an office would leave a lasting impression. This visit enables them to visualize what their future job might look like, helping them understand that everything they’re learning now can one day potentially be turned into a career.

The first station we visited was Quality Assurance, which checks to make sure everything on the websites works correctly. The students took seats at our conference room table. Seeing these small kids sitting in the same big chairs normally inhabited by my co-workers and boss once again made me realize that the experience of being in an office and feeling that level of professionalism presented a special opportunity for them.

“Hello, everyone!” said station leader Alex Van Pelt. “Do any of you know what a bug is?”

The kids learned that a “bug,” in this context, is an error or flaw in a computer program. Alex explained that since our programs are game-based, he gets to spend a lot of time playing our online games to make sure that they are working properly.

“So you get to play computer games all day?” asked one boy. “I want that job!”

Alex asked students to examine a sample web page and find all the bugs. He showed them the corresponding test plan that he would use to systematically check the page and record his findings.

Alex explained that his job is like being a detective, and if they like doing detective work, they would love “QA.” Even better than that, his job makes him feel proud and gives him satisfaction because he plays such an active part in improving our products and helping our company.

As he told the kids, a recent study shows that the happiest job in the world is not a movie star or a sports player like they might think – it’s a Quality Assurance Engineer!

Patrice Dillard shows the kids how coding transforms any image.

Our next station was Web Design and Development. Patrice Dillard helped the kids think about the different things they must do to make a web page come to life, from building the page frame to designing its appearance.

Rather than lecturing, she used a program called Nearpod that linked her presentation to iPads spread across the table for the kids to use. The students could interact with her presentation by answering multiple choice questions and voting.

Patrice explained the functions of coding languages CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. (I learned new facts about them along with the kids!) She made a little yellow Minion appear on the iPad screens, and explained how she used those three programs to create it. She asked the kids  help her change the Minion, and they voted to change its body color blue.

Patrice explained that the computer won’t understand if she just types the word “blue.” Instead, Patrice said that the word for “blue” in CSS language is written as “#0000ff.”

Patrice pressed a few buttons, and the minion’s body turned from yellow to blue in the blink of an eye. The kids were amazed.

“What else should I do?” she asked.

“Change the teeth! Make them really BIG!”

Patrice typed in the code, and the minion’s teeth jutted out of its mouth like a rabbit. The kids burst into laughter.

“How do I do this myself?” a student asked. Patrice showed them a list of free coding programs for beginners written at the bottom of the pamphlets given to them to take home. Their teacher, Mrs. Rivera, reminded them that later in the year they were going to create a website as one of their big projects. The kids cheered.

While the kids laughed at the minion, the next station made them almost cry from laughter. It was Client Services with Dany Ramirez. The lesson began more seriously, with Dany teaching them about the importance of phone etiquette, and modeling how he begins and ends a call.

“I know it might sound crazy, but you actually have to smile while you’re on the phone. Even though the customer can’t see you, they can hear the smile in your voice,” he said, and I took a mental note to follow this advice if I ever need to take a call at our company!

“Who wants to volunteer as a client services agent?” Dany asked, and hands shot into the air. The first up was a student named Brody, who grinned as Dany gave him a headset and phone. Here is where the hilarity ensued: various members of our office called in pretending to be customers. The kids talked with “Moana” from the new Disney movie; “Gazelle,” the Zootopia pop star; and “Elsa.” from Frozen. Elsa was the first call:

“I’m trying to finish an assignment so I can go outside with Anna and build a snowman, but the activity keeps FREEZING on me!” The students erupted into laughter.

Stifling his giggles, Brody read from the script and asked politely, “Can you please provide me with your first and last name?”

“Of course.” Elsa replied. “My name is Elsa. And my last name? I don’t have one. I’m like Madonna,” she said, and now even the chaperones and I were cracking up.

Mrs. Rivera asked me, “Are those really people from your office? That’s hilarious!” Dany coached the students through each call, and although much laughter was had, the students learned a great deal about phone etiquette and what it’s like to work in client services.

Audio Technology and Talent with Tim Horvath and Nela Malary. The students filed into a corner office where a giant monitor and microphone were set up. Tim and Nela introduced themselves, and when Nela said she provides audio for games, word lists, and videos on our site, one student gasped, “So that’s why your voice sounds so familiar!”

Nela spoke into the microphone, and Tim showed how the sound appears as a wavelength on the screen. He pointed out that the wavelength forms peaks and valleys according to the pitch of her voice. He then showed students how he uses the audio software to alter Nela’s voice and make it sound like a chipmunk, or like she is inside of a cave.

Next, Tim and Nela showed a video of the voice actor who does the voice of Freddy, one of our animated game characters. The students were amazed to learn that the person behind the blue childlike creature in our games is actually a perfectly normal-sounding blonde woman with a special talent for changing her voice!

Finally, the kids got to try out audio for themselves. They each read a sentence into the microphone and then listened to their own voices played back. These recordings will be turned into word lists that they can access on VocabularySpellingCity. The kids will get to hear their own voices played on the site and practice vocabulary using something they helped create.

Our last stop was 3D Modeling with Bertrand Joseph. Students sat on the couch and chairs of our CEO’s office to watch Bertrand work his magic. He showed them how to make an ice-cream cone so realistic that the students’ only complaint of the day was that they wished they could grab it from the screen and eat it.

Bertrand kept them guessing at first about what he was making. On a black 3-D graph, he drew the outline of a cylinder. “What do you think it is?” He asked.

“An elevator!” shouted one student.

“A rocket ship!” said another.

Bertrand added more details to the cylinder, and asked again.

“A golf tee!” Someone guessed.

“A rocket ship!” the same student shouted again.

“He already said that wasn’t right!” his friend chided, and they both laughed.

Bertrand pressed the commands to fill in the lines with gray.

“Looks solid now – but not the right color or texture yet. You all ready for texturing?” he asked, and the kids practically jumped out of their seats, bursting to know what the object could possibly be.

Bertrand selected the texture he had prepared, and the cylinder turned light brown and gained a criss-cross pattern.

“AN ICE CREAM CONE!” the kids shouted triumphantly. We then had fun choosing ice cream flavors for the cone, and adding a cherry on top.

“There is one last step left. Watch this,” Bertrand said , and pressed the commands for “rendering.” The kids gasped in awe as the screen changed from a black grid to a realistic-looking horizon line with the ice cream shining in the center as though lit by the sun.

As a last fun thing, Bertrand changed the colors of the ice cream according to whatever flavor the kids could make up. The scoops changed to a bright green “pickle pistachio” flavor and a yellow “rubber ducky” flavor that the kids said would taste like soapy water. Bertrand laughed.

Sam Ligeti, second from left, with VocabularySpellingCity and Science4Us team.

“Good work,” he said. “3D modeling is all about being creative.”

The end of Coding Careers in Action Day had come. As we walked out of the office, the students tugged on my arm and asked if they could work here with me.

“I’ll need your resumes, please,” I joked.

“I want to come back here next year! And when I’m an adult too!” a student said.

I led my group out to the bus and waved goodbye, sad to see them go. Their presence livened up the whole office and made me see our company with fresh eyes. Everything felt new and exciting, from the rolling chairs in the conference room to the fancy microphones for audio. I felt like a kid again as I watched computer science turn minions blue and create “pickle pistachio” ice-cream.

Along with the kids, I felt both in awe of my co-workers and their skill with technology, and empowered by them to believe that with practice, I could master those skills too. The day showed that as powerful and complex as technology might seem, we can treat it simply as a tool that will help us complete our goals and have successful careers. The kids got to see that skill in technology can lead to all kinds of different fun and fulfilling careers in computer science.

What’s the point? Education. The students should leave having engaged in new experiences in a way that transforms them and their thinking about career possibilities, and how these potential career paths connect to their education and daily activities.

At different stations, we start by engaging students’ prior knowledge and curiosity, and then lead them through the experience and logic of our work and potential careers for them. Examples of engagement at each station:

1. Customer Support. Have your parents ever called a company asking for help or complaining about a service?  Most of the students do remember that their parents called, often the cable or electric company, and this leads to the question of, “Have you ever thought about how companies communicate with customers?” We then take them through the process of how we answer the phones, the scripts that we use, and the attitude we have: “Service with a smile.”  From there, the phone rings and we ask for volunteers: “Who thinks they are ready to answer a customer?”  This is how they get introduced to the concept of customer support representatives as a career.
2. Graphic animation. Can you tell the difference between a 2D and a true 3D graphic? Do you know how 3D graphics are made? After that initial discussion, our 3D artist, Bertrand Joseph, shows students how he transforms a virtual cylinder into a cone and then tops it with one, two, and three spheres. In a few minutes, the students see how wireframe geometry of 3D primitives becomes a photorealistic ice cream cone! Bertrand then explains how they can start building their 3D graphic skills using free programs on the web. This is how the artistically inclined might get their first glimpse of a future career as a 3D artist or animator.
   

   Ice cream cone animation: the finished product.

3. The other stations are:
   1. Audio. Students learn about recording and editing digital audio.
   2. Quality Assurance. Students are asked, have you ever used a game or website that did not work as expected? They learn how our staff checks to make sure everything on the websites work correctly.
   3. Computer programming. Have students ever wondered how, for instance, the bugs in our Splat-N-Spell game are made to move around? They get a demonstration of how our activities are created.
   4. 2D animation. Students learn how the cartoon characters in games and cartoons are created.

What makes it educational?  Since we are an ed tech company, we are constantly working to make sure we fulfill the educational component. Here’s some of our thinking:

Engagement. It’s really easy to talk over the heads of students. Frankly, most professionals asked to explain their job to a fifth grader will probably not connect to the student, and will talk right past them. All of our stations emphasize initial engagement both to connect to students’ prior knowledge and to provide them each with hands-on learning. In many cases, such as answering phones or recording audio, the script for hands-on practically writes itself. However, in cases such as 3D art where we don’t (yet!) have the resources or time for each student to get hands-on, we use the concept of virtual hands-on where each student is asked to direct some of the steps and make some some of the decisions in what our artist is doing.

Somerset Academy students have fun with our mascots, HangMouse and Sciefus.

Vocabulary and Retention. Many of the key concepts require the student to understand the vocabulary in order to fully grasp the concept. For students to understand the Quality Assurance function, they need to understand what quality is, how it’s assured, what a test plan is, and how bugs are found, cataloged and solved. These concepts with the associated vocabulary are carefully introduced, fully explored, and then a retention cycle is added.  A brochure of a summary of the stations with key vocabulary is given to each student and we point them towards vocabulary-practicing games on VocabularySpellingCity with this key vocabulary. It’s important to think of key vocabulary as the label or keyword related to an important concept that the students have learned. Retaining the concept is closely related to retaining the vocabulary!

Choices. We emphasize that inside a technology company, there are a wide variety of skills and jobs.  The activities and skills students develop in and outside of school should help them pick the areas they are interested in, and build the skills necessary to succeed in those areas. We make a point of ensuring that they see successful career professionals who look like them, and we spend time letting the students ask them questions about how they embarked on their careers to help them consider their own career paths, how to build skills for them. It helps students internalize that they have and are, on a day-to-day basis, making choices that will shape their futures. We find that we don’t have to get all preachy, since the kids have enough curiosity to ask the questions that bring all this out.

Broward students learning about tech careers.

If your elementary school is local to Fort Lauderdale (Broward County Schools, Palm Beach County Schools, or Miami-Dade Schools) and you are interested in participating in our Coding Careers in Action, contact VocabularySpellingCity to book your time in May. There’s no fee, but we do give preference to VocabularySpellingCity and Science4Us customers.  We are also setting up a mechanism for virtual field trips for non-local schools, so please ask about that too.

More than 1,600 educators registered for Tim’s webinar. Several educators from as far away as Australia watched it live, where it was the middle of the night! Hundreds of teachers across the U.S. also joined the webinar, many of them watching with other teachers.

Everyone who registered will receive a link to the recording of the Tim Rasinski webinar. Our hope is that you learn something new, confirm knowledge you already believed, and share this valuable information with others.

Dr. Tim Rasinski ended his Dec. 1 webinar with a touching memory on the value of teaching, and how much he appreciates the work of all educators.

My three favorite takeaways of his many insightful points are:

• We want students to learn words for a lifetime. Assigning words on Monday and testing on Friday is not good practice in accomplishing the goal of word retention. It didn’t work when we were in school, and it doesn’t work now. So why are we still doing it?

• Learning word families works because our brains are wired to look for patterns. Knowing the 38 most common word families allows students to read and spell 654 one-syllable words. Word automaticity gives students a foundation and this knowledge extends into multisyllabic words.

• In order to comprehend, a reader needs both accuracy and fluency. There are students who can accurately recognize words. This is not reading! Fluency is the necessary bridge between word recognition and comprehension. This allows for a reader’s cognitive energy to focus on the meaning of the text.

At the end of the webinar, Tim thanked teachers. He shared a touching conversation he’d had with his mother about teaching, and a poem that she gave him about the value of being a teacher, attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson : “To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived – this is to have succeeded.” His mother added: “And this is to have been a teacher.”

Tim’s memory showed his deep appreciation of all teachers, the jobs we do, and the lives we change.  

Thanks, Dr. Rasinski, for sharing your knowledge with us – and for just being you.

Watch the complete webinar.

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Tim Rasinski is a professor of literacy education at Kent State University. His research on reading has been cited by the National Reading Panel and has been published in journals such as Reading Research Quarterly, The Reading Teacher, Reading Psychology, and the Journal of Educational Research. Read more about Rasinski here, or connect with him on Twitter @timrasinski1. Dr. Rasinski also wrote a an earlier post in our blog, Automaticity in Word Learning: That’s the Goal.

Dr. Rasinski’s research on word fluency is cited in the report, “Applying Best Practices For Effective Vocabulary Instruction,” written by VocabularySpellingCity in partnership with McREL International.

“She was really interested as soon as she found out we were from VocabularySpellingCity,” Kupres said. “We were sharing ideas and talking about potential collaboration on literacy projects right away. You know it’s going to be a great event when you’re learning and making great friends before you’ve even left the airport.”

It turned out to be true. Once established in booth 23 at the Marriott and Statehouse Convention Center, the VocabularySpellingCity team, which also included regional accounts manager Seth Miller, got a warm welcome from educators, administrators, teachers, coaches, and authors. The scent of cinnamon and chocolate from Ozark Candies and Nuts wafted through the hall, “giving you the feeling of being at home curled up in a blanket,” Kupres said. The Beebe Badger Bookmobile, a repurposed old school bus from Beebe, AR, public schools, sat in the corner inviting word lovers to wander in.

Jeff Anderson, author of the Zack Delacruz book series, was in a booth nearby. As teachers lined up to have their books signed, the enthusiasm was infectious.

The beloved Beebe Badger Bookmobile.

“It was exciting to share our product, because we could feel our excitement reflected back by teachers really interested in using our site for vocabulary-building practice,” Kupres said. “They were curious to learn more.”

Many attendees were drawn to the booth by a sign about popular literacy expert Tim Rasinski, Ph.D., who is leading a Dec. 1 webinar hosted by VocabularySpellingCity.

They’d heard of VocabularySpellingCity, but only knew about its free features – spelling games and word lists on every subject. They were surprised to see how many tools are available to premium members at an affordable price: time-saving teacher productivity and many ways to use class/student data; automated student activity tracking across devices; personalized vocabulary, phonics, and writing activities for every learning level; thousands of word lists on every subject and the ability to create your own; immediate feedback to encourage independent learning; and best of all, games that make learning fun. They didn’t know that VocabularySpellingCity has expanded to focus on building vocabulary to increase comprehension, word retention, and reading fluency.

“This sounds like a really enriching program!” said sixth-grade teacher Kara Scott.

Valerie Ellery gave the keynote speech to a full house, and also gave away a VocabularySpellingCity premium membership.

The team got an assist spreading the word. After delivering powerful strategies for literacy instruction in her keynote, “A ‘Funemic’ Approach to Word Study and Comprehension,” Valerie Ellery gave away a VocabularySpellingCity premium membership. So did presenter Kim Stilwell of the National Science Teachers Association, who spoke about connecting literacy and science.

“It was great getting to know so many passionate Arkansas educators who are eager to explore new ideas and avenues to improving their literacy curriculum,” Kupres said. “We’re really looking forward to working with a lot of them on professional development, and benefiting from their insights on how we can improve VocabularySpellingCity, too.”

Were you at the ARA Literacy Conference, but didn’t get a chance to talk with us? If you’re interested in learning more about how VocabularySpellingCity can enhance your literacy curriculum and professional development, contact us at info@spellingcity.com or (800) 357-2157.