What it is: Spelling City is a fabulous site for practicing spelling, I have written about its uses in the classroom before (here and here). Spelling City has just added a new feature that teachers are going to love, the ability to add your own sentences on Spelling City! Now you can customize your spelling lists to fit your needs. For example, if you are studying fish and one of your spelling words is “scales”, the default sentence that Spelling City might offer is “The scales were not giving the weights accurately.” Now as you create a list, you can click on “add” and type a new sentence to fit your classroom needs. The feature is also extremely useful for homonyms (our fifth graders are using this feature this week!). For the teacher created sentences, the audio read of the sentence will be done by a sophisticated voice synthesis.
How to integrate Spelling City into the classroom: Now that Spelling City allows teacher generated sentences, you can customize your lists for students even more. Have students generate sentences for the weeks spelling words and vote on which sentence should be included on Spelling City. This is a great way to involve your students in thinking about word meanings and uses.
Tips: Spelling City has a premium membership that has been approved for funding by Adopt-a-Classroom.org. You can use the Adopt-A-Classroom service to ask for donations to cover premium membership.
Leave a comment and share how you are using Spelling City in your classroom.
Great! A useful update. I love Spelling City.
This looks like a useful tool. I think more Australian schools will be looking at spelling as that forms part of school test results that have now been made public….
Thanks for the attention. The newest feature on SpellingCity is a way for students to practice their writing! Yes, we’re not your parents’ spelling website. We now have a way, online or with printables, for teachers to assign their students writing assignments to demonstrate that they know how to properly use each word on their list!