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

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.

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

Keys to Vocabulary Success

 Vocabulary is responsible for 70% of reading comprehension problems in elementary schools. And while the research is clear on what most students require to build vocabulary (12 spaced multimodal encounters with a word), many schools ignore the research and reading scores suffer.  Research shows that with the right techniques for word study used ten minutes a day,  reading comprehension can improve by one fifth. It’s proven, low cost to implement, and takes no additional time during the school day.

*     *      *      *

Vocabulary is responsible for 70% of reading comprehension problems in elementary schools.  (source: National Research Council study, 4th graders).

Improving elementary students’ reading comprehension by building vocabulary retention is our mission.   The challenge that we see across the spectrum of elementary schools and students is consistent: it’s vocabulary. In some Title I schools and schools with ESL populations, it can be Tier I words. In general education and for everyone, it’s Tier 2 words with content and academic vocabulary. No matter where the school is located or type of students, vocabulary is a problem.

A problem is that many schools ignore the research on vocabulary retention strategies.  They are also ignoring common sense.  We all know that “learn it for Friday’s test, forget it by Monday” is a common problem.  Why bother teaching all those words if the students are just going to forget them? Some schools have actually dropped explicit vocabulary instruction (#BadIdea!) adopting the wishful and wrongful thinking that if their students read enough, they’ll absorb the vocabulary that they need. Mostly, this isn’t true.

The research is clear: Twelve to fourteen spaced multimodal encounters with words is the recipe for retention.  Here are the key  and necessary ingredients again:

1. Spaced practice over four weeks. Not lots of practice over one week.  Over FOUR weeks.
2. Multiple encounters.  Not 3, not 7: the research says 12-14
3. Multimodal.  Just reading a word does not work. Read, write a sentence using each word, break it down by sounds  or word parts,  count the syllables,  play games with it, say it, and read it again.

I’m going to add a fourth ingredient to the mix.  Fun. Engagement. Word practice can and should me amusing and engaging. Make your classroom a funeteria. Or a funaterium. And while you are making up words as a way to make those pattern recognition engines (ie your students’ brains) work, you might also speak in rhyme, work with rhythms, sing, dance, and otherwise infuse you and your students’ days with games, joy, and engagement (more on this later. Thanks to Dr. Tim Rasinski for reminding us of the importance and possibilities for joy and how we must fight to keep study from becoming grim!).  I digress but by far my favorite part of the CCSS is that starting in kindergarten, students should act out nuances of meaning. I love the idea of classrooms full of students walking / dancing / slithering / marching / sauntering / sneaking and otherwise crossing the room.

Before we get back to the research on vocabulary research, there’s a common confusion about vocabulary that I’d like to clear up.  The vocabulary that’s important to learn is not the fancy esoteric elitist $5 SAT-type vocabulary words like supercilious, engender, harangue, obdurate, or ensconce.  The important vocabulary words are the Tier 1 & Tier 2 words that are in common usage (often ESL students or students from language deprived backgrounds need exposure here)  and the academic and content vocabulary that are the keywords to learning.  For instance, many key science and social studies concepts are accessed through vocabulary words such: river, current, lake, delta, fresh water, brackish water, salt water, ocean, tide, and waves.  When students learn these important concepts (ie a river has current), their ability to retain them are related to the label or vocabulary word for these concepts

Research Based Vocabulary Study – Lets start with Spaced Practice:

Vocabulary Retention Enabled Through Spaced Practice

The teachers teach ideas and concepts on a weekly cycle. The next week, they need to move onto a new topic and too often, the previous weeks vocabulary lessons and words fade away.

Here’s the concrete steps for a school or district to building a system for improving comprehension by revisiting the concepts and vocabulary over four weeks:

1. Train the teachers and the students.  Teachers should understand  the impact of paying some attention to vocabulary retention.  The training should extend to the students so they too understand that the point of the vocabulary study is long-term retention, not just getting through each week’s cycle. Spaced practice, in which the students encounter these words over multiple weeks in different contexts, greatly increases the probability of retention.
2. Use a multimedia game-like system so that the students are truly engaged. It’s important that they can hear the words and see them used in context. Play with them. Figure out what they mean. Write with them. VocabularySpellingCity has been designed specifically to provide this spaced multimodal practice with over 35 different learning activities and games covering from writing sentences for each word to breaking each word down phonetically, from vocabulary to spelling. This variety is important if the students are going to work daily on the system.
3. Use VocabularySpellingCity’s system with reports for teachers, for parents, and for administrators.
   • Assign activities and lists, rather than simply letting students play.
   • Look at the recorded data and hold students accountable for both their level of effort and results.
   • Leverage students’ reading by asking them to harvest 10 interesting words and create a list on VocabularySpellingCity. Then you can share the list with other students, and the students can teach the words to each other. (If you don’t know about student-created lists, you’re missing a key feature.)
4. Measure your progress. As you implement a program for increased vocabulary retention, establish a metric for measuring it either directly or through improved comprehension. One of the trends that needs to be refined in schools is to use testing to encourage and guide success. The point should be formative assessment that’s useful, not high-stakes testing that is so brutal and apparently ineffective.

If you’re interested in the research, there’s a downloadable white paper created by VocabularySpellingCity and McREL International about the field study and another on the academic research behind this approach. Better yet, if you’re interested, give us a call at (800) 357-2157 or contact us online. We can set up your district, school, or classroom rapidly, including plans for ongoing professional development and for measuring your students practice. Let’s work together to make vocabulary your students’ superpower!

Our Journey to Vocabulary

 Many users have noticed that our service transitioned from being spelling-based to this new focus on vocabulary

retention to build reading comprehension. Read about  Our Journey to VocabularySpellingCity. I think many schools and teachers are also transitioning along similar paths. The summary is that from our SpellingCity’s legacy, we remain committed to gamification, student empowerment, and teacher productivity.  It is on this foundation that we built a system for vocabulary building  fully aligned with today’s highest priority in education: improved comprehension.

The critical missing element in building comprehension (verbal and reading) is vocabulary and VocabularySpellingCity is on mission to spread the words about the importance of implementing effective vocabulary retention techniques in classrooms. 

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. 

Learning Goals – Standards – are Posted

In school after school, in Twitter chats, during conference discussions, and in other online sharing, I hear principals and teachers citing details that convince me that this is a broad-based approach.  And it’s really healthy.  Since student empowerment was one of the founding principles of VocabularySpellingCity, I take just a little pride in the fact that we are helping to push this trend forward.

Here are a few places that I see the trend:

In many schools, students are made aware of their educational goals each week.  It’s important that teachers set goals for the class and share them. The students are encouraged to understand the goals, why they are important, how the skills will be built, and how they will be assessed.

Four Levels of Proficiency are Posted

In an increasing number of schools, each week, teachers are posting not only the standards their students will be working on, but they also establish four levels of proficiency for each standard. These seem to be adopted from Webb’s Depth of Knowledge.

The Four Levels of Proficiency are posted in the classroom as a matrix featuring the standards, ways to demonstrate proficiency, and a hierarchy of levels of proficiency.  In some classrooms, there are four sets of standards each week: language arts, math, science, and social studies.

VocabularySpellingCity and Student Ownership of Learning

Four Depths of Knowledge for a Weekly Learning Goal

As I mentioned above, one of VocabularySpellingCity’s original goals, back when we were just SpellingCity, was to empower students to be able to learn on their own. It’s hard to study spelling independently without a tool like VocabularySpellingCity. I published an article on Students Being Able to Own their Learning on their original SpellingCity Forum (now long gone) and then revisited this idea in the October 2015 blog post cited above.

More importantly, as VocabularySpellingCity focused on its mission of improving reading comprehension outcomes by helping students build vocabulary, we identified the importance of enlisting students in the strategy of building vocabulary retention  (see paragraph 5) as a key step in the system.

Students can catch up, keep up, or stay ahead of their grade level by using our activities with our ready-made grade level lists for vocabulary and spelling. For example, this 2nd grade spelling word list gives 2nd grade students (or ambitious first grade students!) the opportunity to test their skills and see how many of these grade-level words they know.

These premade grade-level lists help students figure out what’s expected of them, and how they can continue to improve. Alternatively, letting students create their own lists can also be a great way to help them get motivated.

Most recently, I’ve written on how letting students create their own lists on VocabularySpellingCity helps encourage students to take control and ownership of their learning.  I’ve also detailed how teachers can implement this by changing a single setting in their accounts.

If any of you have examples of how students are owning the learning in your classroom and/or photos to share, please send them along. I’ll retweet and post!

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.