One type that gets some discussion is fluency. I’m thinking of two distinct areas which seem to me to have much in common. For instance, they are both vital, they are both achieved in elementary school, and they both require lots of practice.

I’m talking about phonics skills and math facts.  In both areas, automaticity is necessary.  If a student takes more than a second or so to read a word because they have to slowly sound it out, then the student will not have good comprehension because they took so much time thinking about the phonics. More specifically, the automaticity of great phonics skills avoids cognitive overhead which would result in successfully decoding the words but without successfully understanding the text.

Automaticity of the math facts is almost the same thing. Once the students start talking about equations, they need to be able to whip through the math fact calculations without creating any additional cognitive overload if they are going to build comprehension of the bigger math concepts.

Fortunately, in the last few years, a few online programs have appeared which are effectively gamified and architected. They are gamified so that students want to play on the program. The games are both the practice on the math facts and an overarching point and reward system.  Bottom line, kids think of these new programs as games and want to play. They are architected in the sense that they make sure that the students build proficiency for the long term.  They rely on concepts like spaced practice to make sure that it’s in their long term memory.  They gradually release the students to harder math facts so that they are not overwhelmed but make steady progress.

The best of these programs is Time4MathFacts.  In fact, that’s the consumer version of it. This program is available to schools as Reflex Math.

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 technology program.  A WritingCity efficacy study done with fourth graders in school in  NJ showed an 11.2% improvement over the control group.  More specifically, the WritingCity students’ scores increased by 6.6%, the control group’s scores declined by 4.6% for an overall improvement over the control group of 11.2%.

The Challenge of Effective Writing Instruction in Elementary Schools

Providing an explicit writing curriculum that embeds meaningful and appropriate student practice with writing conventions that include grammar, usage, and mechanics is difficult for most elementary teachers. In classrooms across the country, the writing process and conventions are each taught in isolation. However, educators know that the best place to practice these skills is while students are working on their own writing pieces as they learn about and work through the writing process.

WritingCity is a comprehensive, technology-enhanced K-5 writing program that also teaches grammar in the context of developing students’ writing ability. The program combines explicit writing instruction with the necessary foundational writing skills and strategies. Throughout the curriculum students have frequent opportunities to engage in guided writing assignments where they can apply GUM aspects to their own writing through proofreading, revising, and editing. WritingCity provides explicit instruction in the writing process across all text type (narrative, informative/expository, and opinion) and covers grade level writing and language standards.

Elementary Writing Skills Efficacy Study – Quasi Experimental Study Year-Long Study

A school in New Jersey agreed to participate in a small scale quasi-experimental study during the 2018-2019 school year to determine the effectiveness of explicit instruction of grade level writing conventions combined with independent practice within the student’s own writing.

With the school district’s superintendent, teachers, and parents’ consent, 4th and 5th grade teachers and classrooms at one school were divided into treatment and comparison groups. There were a total of four 4th grade classrooms and three 5th grade classrooms. The treatment group was provided access to the WritingCity curriculum, while the comparison group used writing lessons from the school district’s adopted literacy program.

Data collected from participating students included PARCC writing scores for the 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 school years and a writing conventions pretest in the Fall 2018 and posttest in the Spring 2019.

Results of Writing Efficacy Study

Significant increase in 4th grade student PARCC writing scores among students in the treatment group.
The increased writing scores between 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 among the 4th grade students in the treatment group showed a significant increase compared to those in the comparison group.

As a study, there is a low sample size for the fourth grade. Due to the smaller number of students in the 5th grade students, there was no significant findings between the PARCC scores from 2017-2018 to 2018-2019.

Greater improvement in writing convention skills among the students in the treatment groups. The increased scores between the pretest and the post test of the 4th grade students in the treatment group was significantly higher than the 4th grade students in the comparison group. For the students in 5th grade, both the treatment and comparison group showed improvement from the pretest to post test. The difference wasn’t as significant as the 4th graders, most likely due to the small counts. However, the trend indicates that the improvement of the treatment group would have been more significant if the count was larger.

For schools and districts (or teachers) that wish to implement an effective writing program, WritingCity is easy to implement.

Call   869-689-1408  or email us at info@writingcity.com

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

The English language is hard partially because of some ambiguities in key terms that are used daily. There are words that are just confusing.

Worst of all in my opinion is the word “sorry”.

I’m Sorry

The phrase “I’m sorry” can mean dramatically different things that are easily confused. 

At a funeral, I might say “I’m sorry” to express sympathy or empathy for the person’s loss. But it’s not an apology or admission of guilt. I’m not suggesting that I caused the death.

If I bump into someone on a crowded bus and say “I’m sorry”, it is a sort of apology or at least a recognition that I take some responsibility for the minor mishap. At least, I acknowledge that I regret that this happened even if I’m not assuming responsibility.

However, there’s also the true expression of regret and guilt as in when I ate all the cookies when Mom had said I was only allowed to have one. Busted by Mom, I’ve been shamed and am apologizing to my hungry and cookie-less siblings with “I’m sorry”.  This was an actual admission of guilt, blame, and regret. To this day, I feel guilty about pigging all the freshly-baked cookies that one time!

Back to Education

How is a teacher supposed to get her elementary school students to understand these nuances of meaning when such a critical word has such a range of frequently confused meanings?

I think the answer is to model precise use of language and then to start asking your students to do the same. If a student uses “I”m sorry” in a confusing way, a teacher can ask saying: “Are you just expressing sympathy for an unfortunate situation or are you accepting blame, stating regret,  and resolving to try not to repeat it?”  Of course, in the context of an elementary classroom, that would be harsh and not fully appropriate but I think you see the idea.

Real World Modelling of Being Precise with Words

As a more realistic example, a teacher could say to her students, once an ambiguous word is used: “I’m sorry that English is so hard to understand.”  Then, the teacher could ask the class if they felt the teacher was:

A: Saying it is regrettable that English is so hard
B:  Taking responsibility personally for having created the complexities in English
C: Both of the above

Like many multiple choice class questions, this can be discussed and then people can either vote either by a hand count or having three places in the room to go to be vote and be counted (this is more engaging for many young students and helps avoid having them sit still for too long a time).

Modelling Speaking Precisely

Personally, I could avoid saying that “I”m sorry English is so hard to understand” since it’s ambiguous if I’m taking responsibility or not for the regrettable peculiarities of English (Perhaps as mayor of VocabularySpellingCity I do have some complicity). 

Instead, I should say: “It’s a shame that English is so hard to understand.” This way it’s clear that I’m expressing sympathy for the teachers and students’ heavy burdens without suggesting that I have any guilt or complicity in it.  But in addition to speaking precisely, it’s better pedagogy to explain to everyone why we are choosing the words that we do.

Halloween isn’t only about candy, costumes, and cauldrons. Scare up some learning this spooky season with these Halloween activities!

Literacy Fright Night – Host a Halloween-themed literacy night at your school and invite students’ families. Each teacher can showcase students’ work or organize a student performance based on a particular literacy skill. For example, have students demonstrate action-packed words by performing action verbs in their superhero gear. If you worry your students may not have access to costumes, organize a school fundraiser to collect donations. This is a great way to increase family involvement and get students excited about learning! 

Participating at a local school’s back-to-school literacy night. 

Characters Come Alive – Lead a lesson on character traits, then ask students to dress up as their favorite book character. Students present as their character, giving a detailed description of who they are.

BOO-k Report – Assign a twist on the typical book report in which students use a pumpkin to display the book they read. Students can decorate the pumpkin to resemble the book title or a book character. Later, students can present the story elements of their book, like the characters, setting, and problem and solution.

Compound Word Costumes – Follow a lesson on compound words by having students conjure up compound word costumes. Students can dress up as a butterfly, a starfish, a sunflower, a scarecrow, a cowboy, or any other compound word. You can also ask students to create a compound word coat, embellished with objects that are compound words. Not only will students have fun hunting for compound word toys and artifacts, but they’ll continue to build their knowledge of compound words.

At one school, students were asked to wear one hundred compound words.

What are some spooktacular lessons and activities you do in your classroom?

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.

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 higher grades, we have dedicated science teachers but in kindergarten through second grade, we have the whole class teachers and they just aren’t that comfortable with teaching science. 

Science4Us is effective at meeting this challenge. We designed our program, our materials, and our implementations to provide exemplary inquiry-based science program delivered by generalist teachers. Here’s how:

• Inquiry is built into the instructional model and the lesson plan.  The 5E Instructional Model builds the pattern of inquiry into each model.  The heart of the inquiry model is the explore, explain, and elaborate sequence. This provides the inquiry approach that’s the gold standard for teaching what science is. Science, particularly in the early grades, is primarily a process. The knowledge and vocabulary are also important but without the inquiry process, the knowledge is not so meaningful
  1. In the Explore, the students formulate ideas or hypothesis about the content area and then seek to explore these ideas.
  2. In the Explain, the students seek to articulate what they learned in the Explore process.
  3. The Elaborate does a number of things but in its purest form, the elaborate should be a refinement of the original exploratory question or an application of that hypothesis in a more far-reaching way.  The elaborates not only refine the inquiry or seek to apply it in a more sophisticated manner, it also builds language arts and math skills by providing instruction and practice.
  4. The Science4Us implementation of the complete 5E instructional model starts with an in-depth Engage section so that the prior knowledge of the students is evoked. Prior hypothesis and common understandings and misunderstanding are surfaced through a number of techniques.
  5. The 5th E, Evaluate, is a show-what-you;’ve-learned exercise in which knowledge and skills acquired are demonstrated even if the students are preliterate.
  6. This 5E Inquiry Model is followed by each of the 28 modules covered in Science4Us.
• Science4Us is a complete curriculum which means that it includes:
  1. A usage pattern of 8 sessions for each module which can be covered in two weeks, four days a week.
  2. Around 350 interactive exercises that can be delivered as whole class discussions, in small groups, or one on one with a computing device (tablet, Chromebook, computer).  Most classes blend these different delivery model with the Engage and Explore being the ones most likely to be done as whole class instructions. Part of this is teachers really like leading Science4Us-based lessons.
  3. Over a thousand printable activities covering worksheet versions of most of the interactives (especially the evaluates) and also, large numbers of hands-on inquiry-based activities as wells as STEM or STEAM extensions. For instance, the pictures above are taken from a teacher training in which the teachers are asked to the hands-on activities to explore how a swing works in the motion module of physical science.
  4. Materials just for teachers include lesson plans, teaching tips, and common misconceptions. These materials are typically one to two pages long and in following a strict format, teachers quickly get comfortable delivering Science4Us lessons to their students with minimal preparation.



• The PD model of Science4Us is flexible. Generally, the online videos and tips make accessing the materials, software, and lessons easy so they require minimal training time. The PD time is best used taking the teachers through a module as if they were students so they receive the materials and see how the 5E Instructional Model really does render intimidating concepts into simple steps. Most importantly, it illustrates who a proper structure to  5E-based instruction has the students doing science inquiry as a routine part of the process. In many schools, the PD has several steps of implementation, including having Science4Us staff model lessons to the students.  Here is more information on how LearningCity provides help with teacher training for  Science4Us, VocabularySpellingCity, and WritingCity.

While many schools have dedicated science teachers from third grade up, most rely on the regular teacher for science instruction in the youngest grades. Equipped with the right curriculum, the natural curiosity of young children can be channeled into a science inquiry model and rather than quashing their enthusiasm, the students can begin to understand the scientific inquiry process and to self-identify as interested in and good at science!

Increasingly, principals and superintendents are  asking us  to help develop their teachers. We have always provided professional development to support our products but the requests we have been hearing over the last year are of a different order of magnitude. For example principal leaders are searching for strategies as opposed to basic pacing guides.

Rather theatrically, the  head of curriculum for elementary schools in one of the larger school districts told us: “Our core problem is developing our teaching staff. If you can help us meaningfully develop our human capital, lets talk. Otherwise, we just don’t need any more curriculum or teaching tools. Our teachers are the problem and opportunity, lets focus on them.”

Fortunately, we have a great approach to training teachers both on best practices as well as how our products help teachers implement these both practices. We provide this training both with our own great trainers and through  embedded PD to help move them along.  To be honest, teaching teachers is not rocket science. In fact, teaching teachers is in some ways best accomplishment using the same educational techniques that we use to teach students.

We often use the same principles that we generally deploy for education.  For example, lets look at how we help K-2nd teachers get ready to upgrade their science education. This is part of our Science4Us program for K-2nd.

Let’s first be frank about primary teachers and their science teaching skills. Most teachers who focus on the primary grades are not that big into science. And while they often have a few  experiments or demos that they like to do in science, most of them lack fluency with the basic science concepts and are somewhat disconcerted by the newly adopted science standards over the last few years.

So where do we start?  First, we get back to basics.  We engage prior knowledge and often get them hands-on right at the start.  Boy, do they like it! We make PD fun and engaging.   We want to make sure that we model the same hands-on approach that we hope our teachers will use with their students.  With onsite PD, teachers complete investigations, art connections and literacy activities that are directly aligned to their current pacing guides.  This will enable them to go right back to their classrooms with their new knowledge.  Teachers are then given an opportunity to work with the PD team as they sort through many games and stories that can be easily assigned to students to further enhance their learning.

In terms of literacy, LearningCity has two programs to help elementary language arts programs.  In each case, we find that bringing the teachers into the vision has enormous pays offs in terms of improving their elementary languages arts programs.

Lets start with vocabulary study and how VocabularySpellingCity, when used properly, improves reading comprehension scores by over 20%. And it does so with no additional study time and without a major investment. Here’s why: Most elementary teachers are already doing a great job of teaching vocabulary words. They know this because every week their students learn a lot of new words.  But these same teachers are unable to get their students to retain this vocabulary so that it enters the long term vocabulary of their students.  The problem is that the teachers are trying to follow the breakneck pace for delivering curriculum without any attention to having a retention cycle for vocabulary.  This can make all the difference in whether students actually accumulate enough vocabulary and fluency with the vocabulary to be effective readers.

Vocabulary weakness is the primary problem with student reading comprehension.  The key here is for teachers to understand how students actually master vocabulary. It’s not from studying it from one week or encountering the word just in teaching.  For most students retain words it requires 12-14 encounters with a word over four to six weeks and in a variety of modes: an interdisciplinary approach to learning vocabulary.

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 teachers and even students seem to refer to it.

I like that this enlists the student in understanding what they are aspiring to learn.

Frankly, I don’t like how often I hear teachers refer to these standards as important because of the test.

Here’s a chart that I particularly like ( I found it in a tweet by  a teacher – Joseph Brassington – @jjbrassington –  who added the display around the wheel by thisisbalance.co.uk or @balance_edu)

So, a few questions:

Do you post every week? How many subjects and just the standard or a four depths of proficiency regarding the standard?

Do you do it because you believe in it or because it’s mandated?

How do you discuss the standards with the students? How do the students react?

And most importantly, please share a picture of how the standards appear in your classroom under #picstds .

While there’s been a lot of talk of furniture arrangement, there’s another change that I see everywhere that doesn’t seem to get any discussion: the posting the week’s educational goals.

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.