Spelling City is a homework helper website. It manages to help students focus on spelling while offering a fun and relatively safe environment online.
Make Spelling Fun for Children
Spelling lists can become a tedious homework chore for children. Spelling City has developed a way to make the much needed practice fun for all kids. The website is completely customizable.
Parents, caregivers and teachers can enter the desired spelling list. Children can work through a teaching mode, a testing mode and a game mode. Most items are printable so parents and caregivers can keep track of the children’s progress.
In the testing mode the students hear the word read aloud. Students can then click a button to hear the word again or another button to have the word used in a sentence. This feature is incredibly helpful for those words that sound the same but have different meanings. When the test is complete the student will see a screen with his or her grade on it. This screen allows the student to click “Teach Me” on the words he or she missed.
Play a Spelling Game, Hear Spelling Words
Spelling City offers a series of printable or free online games using a customizable spelling word list. Parents can enter five or ten spelling words, and Spelling City can turn this list into a word search, a matching game, hang mouse, crossword puzzle, and many more. There is also a batch entry function but many of the games will only use ten or less words.
The interactive teaching mode includes a real voice reader. The words are slowly sounded out as the letters appear on the screen. This is helpful for a child who learns spelling through audio and visual learning.
Spelling City offers several pre-programmed spelling lists. Children can learn to spell geographic words such as the states, the countries, or the continents. Children can learn to spell words in popular fiction books. All lists (pre-programmed or entered by a parent) can be printed out in a variety of fonts, including cursive. This offers those students who need additional handwriting practice a way to practice handwriting while reinforcing their spelling words.
There are many more resources on Spellingcity.com. There is a forum for parents to interact with other parents and a premium edition (which allows parents to pay a fee for better tracking tools). Also on the site is a list of dolch sight words, homonyms, frequently confused words and compound words.
Is Spellingcity.com Safe?
Spelling City uses Google advertisements and some other ads appear on some of the pages. Therefore it is possible for a child to navigate off the website. The Google advertisements that appeared during this review all led to other educational websites which would be harmless to most children. These websites open in another window and do not cause a child to lose his or her place in Spelling City.
Some other sites reviewed include Fog, Oswego City Schools, Poptropica, these websites also offer some free online educational games for children.
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