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

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.

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