Monday, June 7, 2010

Spelling Mania

Many of you are Spelling City fans, as well you should be if you're an elementary school teacher teaching spelling. This site is the best I have seen for offering many different teaching and reinforcement activities using words from your own lists and curriculum. So if you haven't seen it yet, do check out Spelling City.


After that, I encourage you to try these other spelling sites. No accounts are needed to use them.

Literacy Zone's English Spelling Games: This one has interactive stories and 14 spelling games addressing such spelling skills as plurals, clusters and blends, synonyms, prefixes and suffixes and homophones.

Mr. Nussbaum's Everglades Spelling: I liked this one because I could pick the animal I wanted to be and race against the others to fill in the missing letters in words as they appear.

Gumleaf Games Word Safari: This one has different challenge levels and I can see kids really liking it. Once I figured out I had to use the arrow keys to guide my little guy through the air (think "Up") to the correct letters while dodging the incorrect ones, I had a great time.

Candlelight Stories Stellar Speller: This one has kids spell the words for pictures they see. I think it might be good for partner work because some kids might not have the prior knowledge to know the exact word for the picture. It is like hangman in that it gives the number of letters for each word.

Zaner-Bloser's Spelling Connections: Beside complete the sentence and word sorting activities, this site has a proof-reading game where students find errors in prepared text and correct them using proofing marks and proper spelling.

Language Arts Spell It: This one is a collection offering about 40 spelling games including a number of quizzes and bees.

Photo credit to Mr Gustafson on WikiMedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chelsea,_England,_Spelling_Lesson,_1912.JPG

2 comments:

  1. Hi Chris,

    Thanks for the wonderful resources. I love Spelling City, and I wasn't aware of Everglades Spelling--very cool!

    I wanted to let you know that I have run across the Candlelight Stories site before and have stopped recommending it and using it with kids because the blog linked on the site isn't appropriate for children. For example, if you click on the Opinions blog post tag on the right side of the page, you'll find that the first post uses inappropriate language. Just FYI!

    Thanks,
    Emily

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  2. Thanks, Emily, for the heads up on the Candlelight Stories site. I did notice that some of the links ventured off into discussions of a more mature nature. The other potential downfall I saw with the site was that I couldn't figure out how to choose another grade level besides Grade 1.

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