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

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.

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.

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. 

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

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!

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

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

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

My three favorite takeaways of his many insightful points are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch the complete webinar.

_________________________________________

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

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

Teachers face the dilemma to teach or not to teach cursive.  

This is a tough one to answer. While an overwhelming amount of evidence shows the benefits of writing by hand, few studies differentiate between print and cursive, and even fewer come to definite conclusions about which should be taught.

But we don’t need hard scientific evidence to begin a discussion about cursive’s possible merits or drawbacks. With the removal of cursive from Common Core standards in a number of states, the

country is engaged in a lively and important debate about the value of cursive in today’s world. Educators are torn over whether cursive has enough value to justify the time it takes to teach. Now that teachers must make room for lessons in keyboarding and other technology skills, is there still space for cursive in the classroom?

The Science

Educational psychologist Virginia Berninger conducted a study showing that cursive activates different brain patterns than print (Konnikova, 2014). So it’s possible to argue that because cursive presents another way for students to conceptualize and recognize letters, this variation creates stronger and more flexible connections to text. Students will be faster at letter recognition, and quicker to understand letters regardless of their design (script or even font type). Is this increased flexibility worth the extra hours of instruction? This is where opinions differ.

A few scientists suggest that cursive might benefit students with learning disorders or disabilities. It’s possible that cursive prevents the inversion of letters, because unlike print, all the lowercase letters begin on the same line. It has also been proposed that its joined nature discourages reversals. (McInnis & Curtis, 1982). This may especially benefit students with dyslexia and other learning impairments. However, the last studies were conducted in the 1980s, and more research should be done to fully back this claim.

Structural Advantages

Researchers point to other structural advantages of cursive, saying that its flowing movement reinforces left-to-right directionality, the joined letters visually replicate the blending of sounds within words and show each word as a cohesive unit (“Why Cursive First?”). The logic here seems intuitive, but hasn’t been sufficiently studied.

What About Speed?

Some teachers swear that cursive is faster, while others disagree. A 2013 study by Bara and Morin found that students taught script wrote faster than those taught cursive. However, students first taught cursive adopted a blended style in later grades that was faster than both (Ball, 2016). Where does that leave us? Perhaps the question of speed should fall more on an individual case basis. Our minds and bodies work in different ways — cursive might be faster for some people, and slower for others.

Personal Expression

Some scholars support cursive for reasons of expression and identity. They believe children should be given all the writing options, so that they can figure out what feels most comfortable to them. Trying out various modes of writing gives them more opportunities to express their personality and develop their personal style.

If we abandon teaching cursive, will future generations be able to read historical documents – like the U.S. Constitution? What’s your perspective on the value of teaching cursive?

Pride and Aesthetics

Penmanship can be a source of pride and artistry. Those stressing the importance of handwriting remember the pride they felt in developing their own personal signature in cursive and wonder, will kids even be able to sign their name anymore?

History and Tradition

Tradition is another factor to consider. Cursive enables students to read some pretty important historical documents (the U.S. Constitution!), or the writing of older family members. Should we preserve a form of writing widely believed to be more elegant and beautiful than print, one that has so gracefully recorded major moments in human history?

Modernity

Our world is changing, and some people, such as literacy expert Randall Wallace, do not believe that any potential benefits of cursive justify the amount of time it takes to teach in the classroom. Wallace believes that students will receive all the benefits of handwriting instruction by learning print, and the time previously spent on cursive can be allocated to developing the technology skills needed for the future (Ball, 2016). Time constraints are Common Core’s reasoning for cutting cursive from the requirements, and many teachers echo these concerns.

There are valid arguments on both sides. What do you think? Is it time to let go of cursive, or do you see its benefits?

Whether you are looking handwriting practice for print or cursive, VocabularySpellingCity makes all of your spelling lists available as handwriting worksheets. You can choose print, cursive, D’Nealian font, or sign language; guiding arrows on or off; lower and upper case; small, medium, or large type size; and alignment to the left or right, depending on which hand each student writes with.

Simply click on the name of the list, and then click the ‘Handwriting Worksheets’ link. Click here to see an example.

Works Cited

Ball, Philip. “Cursive Handwriting and Other Education Myths – Issue 40: Learning – Nautilus.” Nautilus. N.p., 08 Sept. 2016. Web. Nov. 18, 2016.

Konnikova, Maria. “What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades.” Editorial. New York Times n.d.: n. pag. The New York Times. The New York Times, June 2, 2014. Web. Nov. 18, 2016.

Phillip J. McInnis and Sandra K. Curtis, The Cursive Writing Approach to Readiness and Reading, M/C Publications, 1982

“Why Cursive First?” Montessori Learning Center. N.p., 2012. Web. Nov. 18, 2016.