Thursday, February 10, 2011

Spelling City Here I Come

Homeschool.com sends out emails all the time with a variety of things offered.  This time I really looked and am pleasantly surprised.

"No cost" was what caught my eye and made me open the email.  The actual website made me stay. 

Book SpellingI think SpellingCity.com will become part of my regular arsenal.  You can enter and save your own spelling lists which makes it a really useful addition.  You can even select which definition of a word you would like to use.  There are a selection of games and activities your student can play using the words.  Some focus on the meaning and some focus on the spelling with games such as hang man, crossword, and word search.  There's 15 games all together.

I think the one my daughter spent the most time on was "audio word match."  It's basically a concentration game using the spelling words.  The audio aspect is that when you select a word you hear it spoken. 

You can even take the spelling test on the site.  I'm not going to use this right now because I want to make sure I grade spelling and not keyboarding skills. 

All this and more are available for free.  A premium membership will allow you access to more games and actually keep spelling records on the site.  I don't see that it would be a necessary expense in order to use the site productively. 

Two "downers" about the site.  First, you get a lot for free which means a lot of advertising.  It can be very easy to think you're accessing something on the site and find yourself somewhere else.  The second "downer" is that in order to review a whole spelling list, you have to play a game a few times.  Not a big deal if especially if you're not depending on the games to do all the review.

3 comments:

BBat50 said...

Hello Mrs Price is Right, I appreciate the review of SpellingCity (I'm part of the team).

I'm not sure that I understand what you meant by:

"The second "downer" is that in order to review a whole spelling list, you have to play a game a few times."

Lastly, if you'd do another review, I can provide you with a free Premium Membership. The idea would be for you to provide some guidance to your readers on whether (and for whom) a premium membership is worthwhile.

If you're interested, just email mayor @ spellingcity.com - thanks, john

Betsy Price said...

Wow! What an honor to have an actual SpellingCity team member come by! I'll be glad to email privately about my thoughts. Thanks!

Betsy Price said...

I wanted to share what I wrote to SpellingCity about the question just in case others wondered what I meant by my comment as well!

>>>

You had a question about my comment, "The second "downer" is that in order to review a whole spelling list, you have to play a game a few times."

What I meant was for some games such as crossword, or MatchIt Sentences, not all the words are use for one game. For instance, this week we have a list of 17 words. If I want to make sure my daughter covers all 17 words while playing AudioWordMatch, she needs to play the game at least twice.

It's not really a major issue. The games are enjoyable, and I understand they would become overwhelming if all the words were used on certain games. It just means that I have to make sure games are played enough to make sure all words are reviewed.

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