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Teaching Literacy

WritingCity Fourth Graders Improved 11.2% ON PARCC Writing Scores

The original of this article is available on the WritingCity website! 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

John October 4, 2019 educational technology, Teaching Literacy No Comments Read more

Our Phonics Patent

Even as we rolled out SpellingCity, teachers and literacy coaches asked us to do more with helping students with sounds. They asked us to convert the games to focus not just on spelling practice but on practice activities for recognizing

John August 15, 2019 educational technology, Helping Teachers, New Games & Activities, Site Features, Teaching Literacy No Comments Read more

Posting Educational Standards

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

John February 10, 2018 educational technology, Teaching Literacy No Comments Read more

VocabularySpellingCity Speaks with an Australian Accent!

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

John January 13, 2018 educational technology, New Games & Activities, Teaching Literacy No Comments Read more

Sound Counter: Building Literacy 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

John January 12, 2018 educational technology, New Games & Activities, Teaching Literacy No Comments Read more

Which Letter Team?

Happy New Year and to celebrate, VocabularySpellingCity has provided several new learning games to its Premium Member.  These learning games provide unique benefits to schools, teachers, and students in building foundational, phonics, and vocabulary skills.  Because of their flexibility, high

John January 12, 2018 educational technology, New Games & Activities, Site Features, Teaching Literacy No Comments Read more

Improving Reading Comprehension through Vocabulary Retention

 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.

John July 9, 2017 educational technology, Flipping the Classroom, Helping Teachers, Teaching Literacy No Comments Read more

Our Journey to VocabularySpellingCity

SpellingCity’s Journey 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

John July 9, 2017 educational technology, Helping Teachers, New Games & Activities, Teaching Literacy 1 Comment Read more

Elementary Students: Owning the Learning

One of the brightest trends that I see in education today is a broad nationwide move to have students own their learning and to adopt a growth mindset. I’m particularly encouraged to see that this is a distinct trend in elementary schools. In

John April 10, 2017 educational technology, Flipping the Classroom, Helping Teachers, Teaching Literacy No Comments Read more

Students: Creating Lists, Owning Learning

Everyone would like it if students took more “ownership” of their learning. Students would like it, and so would parents and teachers. VocabularySpellingCity makes it easy to give students more accountability for their own learning. Once they’ve chosen a book

John April 2, 2017 Flipping the Classroom, Site Features, Teaching Literacy No Comments Read more
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Most Popular Articles

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  • Elementary Students Owning the Learning?
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  • Our Journey to Vocabulary
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John Edelson

LearningCity Mayor

Recent Posts

  • Fluency on the Basics
  • WritingCity Fourth Graders Improved 11.2% ON PARCC Writing Scores
  • Our Phonics Patent
  • I’m Sorry
  • Explore Our Resources for Children with Special Needs
  • Words That Don’t Mean What They Say – Idioms!
  • Sing a Song to Reading

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