Thursday, February 25, 2010

Cool Education Site

Hey, I found this pretty cool (thus far, anyway) education site to help with the kiddos SPELLING!


It's called SpellingCity!  There's a free version (which is what I went for, of course), plus a premium membership - which I just didn't think I needed.  I registered, set up my main page (as a parent - you can do this as a "teacher" - I'm gonna look into that option), then began typing up and saving a few spelling lists.

**by the way, I just looked online for free grade level spelling lists.  I could grab vocab words from whatever we are working with, if I wanted to, but this is just a quick, easy way to handle it for now.  I grabbed my lists from HomeSpellingWords - they have lists from first grade through seventh, with anywhere from 20-31 lists depending on which year.  First grade (the one I'm using) has 24, I believe.

This site starts with very basic words (First Grade, List 1), such as "an", "add", "had", "man" all labeled as BASIC.  Yet it also has CHALLENGE words such as "Halloween", "pumpkin", "October" and "animal" (I'm guessing you're supposed to start this list in the fall, eh?).


So anyway, back to SpellingCity.....the kids pull up the site, login (I taught 'em how), pick what list they are on and then they can do three things:  1) TEACH ME - spelling, pronunciation, and in a sentence, 2) PLAY A GAME - 12 different games, using your list words, going over things such as spelling, vocabulary & alphabetical order and 3) TEST ME - which goes over any missed words, allows retakes, and then offers for you to print a report or a certificate.  And this is all on the free membership (premium membership has some different game options, allows you to save your students scores, etc.)


Ok, so there ya go - my commercial for SpellingCity!  I'll let ya know how things are going in a few weeks....


6 comments:

Brooke said...

Sounds neat!

Jessica D. said...

Autumn does this.. it's great!

Unknown said...

Isaac was playing on the computer right before me. As he was playing, I heard Selah run in and say "There are 2 L's in Halloween, Isaac. 2!"

So cute ~ and fantastic that they are learning. Um, Spelling is NOT my thing.

While they are using that site, I have to turn off the spellchecker on Google Chrome (our browser).......yet I have to turn it right back on when I get on the computer. Ugh, I'm a terrible speller~

Kelly said...

I've used them before, but the site can be vvveeerrryyy slow on the free side, so we ended up losing interest. Maybe they've fixed it since we were there.

Unknown said...

Hmmm.....well, we have fairly slow internet connection out here in the country (although better than dial-up) and we haven't had any trouble ~ but maybe we're just really used to slow computers?!?

No, really, it hasn't been a problem. Maybe they *did* fix that?

Kelly said...

Good to know. Maybe we'll try again.