Spellcity.com
VocabularySpellingCity.com is dedicated to helping students, teachers, parent-teachers, and school systems. VocabularySpellingCity is an award-winning site with ongoing introduction of new features, many based on input from existing users. Our mission: efficient game-based study of literacy skills using any word list.
The site was launched on the web as SpellingCity in 2008 and has grown primarily through word of mouth. SpellingCity immediately went viral and had millions of users in the first school year when it was really just a spelling practice utility. The site’s services and traffic have steadily expanded over the years. In January 2011, SpellingCity became VocabularySpellingCity to reflect the addition of significant vocabulary capabilities. During the 2010-11 school year, the site attracted two million unique visitors per month – over four million visits total, and over 40 million page views monthly. In 2011-12, VocabularySpellingCity enhanced its …
- Published in Vocabulary
Vocabulary.com
Vocabulary.com
Look up a word, learn it forever.
Don’t just memorize. Achieve mastery.
Ditch the flash cards and stop memorizing definitions. Vocabulary.com teaches you words by systematically exposing you to a wide array of question types and activities that will help you understand all the meanings and nuances of every word you’re learning.
Even after you’ve achieved mastery, Vocabulary.com continues to reinforce what you have learned to make sure that it all stays fresh in your memory.
Look up a word in their dictionary — you’ll read a friendly explanation that you’ll actually remember. It’s as if your favorite teacher were explaining the word to you.
Clever usage tips and real-world examples show you how words live in the wild so you’ll be more confident using them yourself.
See a word you’d like to know better? Click “Learn this Word”
- Published in Vocabulary
What if public schools fail?
Both of my parents are 80 this year and both are retired public schools educators. Mom was reading a news article this week about the state of public schools in North Carolina. She was shocked and appalled. As I was bringing her up to speed on several things far from her imagination since her retirement, she recalled something one of her former principal’s (Bob Clendenin) had said. “If public schools fail, so will middle class.”
As we see a shift in politics in moving towards the privatization of schools through vouchers and expansion of charters, public school employees seem to be the few who understand the big picture and long-term effects of this transformation in education. The unintended and unexpected consequences of this considerable permutation will not only change the face of public education, but will also substantially change the …
- Published in Betsy DeVos, ESSA
100 People: A World Portrait
Global Studies lesson plans included!
“While living in Paris, I received an e-mail from my friend and fellow filmmaker Isabel Sadurni entitled, “If the World Were 100 People.” It offered an accurate description of the world population proportionally represented by 100 individuals (1:62.5 million), based on criteria such as age, nationality, gender, religion, and language. We both found the statistics describing the present state of our humanity on the planet both stunning, and deeply moving. We then asked ourselves, what do we really know about the people with whom we share the planet and why should we care about them, or more to the point, how do we express our care? We recognized that as a result of looking at the world population as a village of 100 people, we could better come to know …
- Published in Digital Literacy, Global Studies
Yummy Math
Yummy Math provides teachers with an easy way to bring real-life into their math classrooms. It is our belief that when math is explored in contexts that are familiar and of interest to students, students will be more engaged to do math, reason, think critically, question and communicate. Our activities are written to correspond with the NCTM Process Standards and the CCSS Standards for Mathematical Practice.
While the site is free to teachers, to get a solution page in addition to the problems you must pay a nominal fee. The fee is $24.95 and definitely worth it to help support this creation of wonderful resources.
Activities include and exploration of lots of yummy food activities of course, but also interesting explorations of the Iditarod, Super Bowl, weather related units and much much more!
Check out the sampling below:
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- Published in Common Core, Mathematics
The Beginning of Time
There is an entire page of this website dedicated to teacher time. But it is a topic we find ourselves as educators returning to over and over and over again. Maybe because being a teacher is the only career where you have self imposed guilt for leaving your classroom for 2 minutes when your bladder is about to burst just to rush across the hall to take a restroom break. Or possibly it has to do with the fact that you have 30 minutes scheduled for lunch each day all while being accompanied by a class of about 28 students that have no chance of ever knowing who Emily Post is.
Time is a teacher’s greatest commodity. So when I saw a friend’s post on Facebook with a picture of her nuzzling her newborn baby daughter captioned by “The …
- Published in Digital Literacy, School Climate, Teacher Time