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.

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

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 spoken with a distinctly American accent. Fine for the movies and music, not so great for schools and education.

We are pleased to announce that as of January 2018, we have learned to speak in an Australian or a British accent! It’s users choice and activating it is an easy setting adjustment, just 1, 2, 3!

This update complements VocabularySpellingCity’s built-in ability to support multiple spellings of words. Here’s some background information on VocabularySpellingCity’s support of British spellings.

Hundreds of schools and thousands of teachers in Australia and New Zealand have relied on VocabularySpellingCity for years for help with spelling practice and tests. Starting in January 2018, you can count on us supporting your accent.

The new accent is especially useful in our phonics activities. For ideas on great phonics lessons, check out our pages on consonant blends, vowels, digraphs, and more.

The Australian and British voices are synthetic. When teachers create their own sentences or add words, they will be automatically spoken with the selected accent. Additionally, if the student writes in either sentence or paragraph writing practice and asks to listen to it, it will be spoken with the selected regional accent.

Learn how our program will work for your classroom.

Register Now, Wherever You Are!

In additional news, there were five new games just launched and which are free to all users for January of 2018:

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

Builds Vital 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 be asked how many sounds are there in the word: read?

Students count the sounds by dragging the colorful sound makers up into the box and then hit the submit button when they’re done.  If the student picked the right number, the get positive feedback and the word is shown broken up into sound boxes to reinforce their count and to demonstrate how the letter combinations form the distinct sounds.

Words Displayed with Sound Boxes

Sound Counter helps build some key foundational skills for learning to read such as phonemic awareness, phonological skills, and the alphabetic principle.  Basically, this is:

• The awareness that words are made up of distinct sounds (phonemic awareness).
• The skill to recognize the sounds used in English (phonological skills).
• The principles behind phonics such as sounds can be represented by a single letter or a variety of letter combinations (alphabetic principle)

The students who master these skills in the early grades have a solid foundation and track record in learning to read effectively, the students who do NOT master these skills tend to flounder in building literacy skills.

You can use SoundCounter to teach a phonics lesson on important phonics topics such as digraphs, consonant blends, and vowels.

One of the challenges in mastering these skills is that they are totally dependent on quality auditory input.  Prior to having reasonable cost easy-to-use educational materials such as VocabularySpellingCity’s Sound Counter, this auditory input was mostly provided by teachers which are costly. Sound Counter provides a new level of interactive easy access to practice these skills. Plus, designed to engage the students, they leverage the student’s curiosity and interest in using engaging tools to build skills.

The VocabularySpellingCity suite of early learning skill-building activities:

Read about some of the other games: Sound It Out,  Vocabulary Memory Match, and Which Letter Team?

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

Our Journey from SpellingCity to VocabularySpellingCity

At VocabularySpellingCity, we went through a transition, moving from being a spelling program to one focused on vocabulary building and reading comprehension. Here’s our story from the beginning.

I had a few goals in 2010 when I was starting SpellingCity, as I called it then.

First, I thought students should be empowered to study on their own, yet practicing vocabulary and spelling words were an example of where students needed to ask others to help. I wanted to build a tool that allowed them to study independently.

Then, I looked at how teachers do their job and I realized that nobody had really focused on building productivity tools for teachers. They were still spending their time on non-value-added activities such as handing out lists, reading off words for tests, grading tests by hand, and then recording them in their grade book. So my second mission was to provide meaningful productivity tools to help teachers. The third part of the initial mission was to make it all easy to use and fun.  Prior to creating an educational tech company, I had made video games for PlayStation. I  come to the concept of gamification with some serious experience.

So this is SpellingCity’s legacy: gamification, student empowerment, and teacher productivity.  It is on this foundation that we are building a focus and system for vocabulary building which is fully aligned with today’s highest priority in education: improved comprehension. 

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

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.