Spelling City.com review - premium membership

A while ago I found a great website for helping our kids to practice their spelling :

 www.SpellingCity.com

So a few weeks ago I was thrilled when they contacted me and offered me a trial of their premium membership so I could review it!  I signed up straight away, and have been making good use of it with my girls weekly spelling lists they bring home from school!

The site has a great selection of games and activities that can be played for free. You can create an account as a parent - then type in your kids spelling lists and save them so they can use those words in various games. 

There are games to match the words with sentences,  find the words in wordsearches, writing sentences practice, and of course various spelling games. A big favourite of my girls is Hangmouse:

Where you have to guess the word in a certain number of guesses otherwise the cat wakes up and catches the mouse!

As I said, we had been enjoying using this site for a while - but since starting up our Premium Membership, we have been even more impressed, and our girls have had even more fun with all the new games they now have access to!

With the premium membership, I can now keep track of what our girls are doing. I can set them 'assignments' with particular spelling lists -and they enjoy logging on to see which of the games I've chosen for them each time!  A new favourite is Letterfall.  This game is not unlike the old-fashioned space invaders games I remember played as a child - except instead of shooting up at things, you have a mouse with a basket who has to catch the letters as they fall!

The game gets progressively harder with things other than letters falling which may give you bonus points, or take points away if you catch them! So you have to pay attention to what you're catching!

Another favourite of the Premium Membership games is Word-o-Rama which is a word game show, where you have to identify the word by their definition, synonyms, antonyms, or context in a sentence.

With the premium membership - not only do you have access to lots of extra games and activities - you also get some great features that enable you to track your kids progress.

I like being able to see what activities my girls have been doing - and the scores they have achieved.

I am finding that the premium membership is a great resourse to have to help my girls with their school spelling homework - and the often stay on afterwards playing more games of their own choice!

I would highly recommend this site to anyone with kids to help them with their spelling and vocabulary skills. The upgrade to Premium membership costs $29.99 for a whole year and up to 5 students. There are also better deals for teachers signing up whole classes or schools with even more students registered.

Go and take a look - it is a fantastic and fun website for kids - which also allows parents to see their kids progress educationally through the games.

Thank you to SpellingCity.com for the opportunity to experience the Premium Membership!

When do children understand time?

Have you ever told your young child, "It'll just be a few minutes!"  when actually it will be a lot longer ?

Very young children do not have a good concept ot time, and how long things take.  Waiting for them always seems to take forever - regardless of whether it's for 2 minutes or 20 minutes. So when do they get this concept and how can we help them?

From my experiences with our girls, and backed up with what I've read, children don't get a good grasp on time until they're around  6 or 7 years old.  Before that they are learning about routines, basic o'clock times,  sequencing - what you do 'before' and 'after', and past, present and future with talk of what we did today, yesterday and what we're going to do tomorrow.

I found that a timer was a great tool for our girls to use to get an understanding of how long things take.  By showing them how to set the timer themselves,they could then watch the time ticking by, and see how long they'd already been waiting for something, and how much longer they still had to go!

They use their timer when playing on the computer for their 'set allowed time',  when taking turns playing with something they share, when helping with cooking and baking and even for doing their winter job of moving the sprinklers around the garden to water all our plants!

Then there is of course, learning to tell the time - both digital and analogue.  There is nothing better than giving your kids their own watch - they delight in being able to tell the time at any given moment! (and they do this LOTS initially when it's still a novelty!)

I also recently played some games with them of guessing how many certain things we could do in a minute!  This was lots of fun,and again gives them an understanding of how long a minute is!

But as with everything, there are some great websites with games to help kids learn:

Once they have got the basics, this site has a great game with 3 different levels:

It's another BBC website (the BBC produces some wonderful educational material) - which also has plenty of other literacy and numeracy games which are worth a look:

What things have you done to help your kids understand the concept of time?  Do you have any ideas you can share with everyone? We'd love to hear from you!

Can learning your times tables be fun?

Apparently learning your times tables can be a lot of fun!  Our daughters are currently learning theirs, and we've found they actually enjoy reciting them and trying to remember them if we use rhythm.

Combining saying your times tables with some kind of rhythm and exercise seems to be the most fun combination.

A few weeks ago, I was walking up a local hilly walking track with the girls, while Dad ran around a bigger track.  They started to get tired, and began to drag their feet and want to stop, so in an attempt to take their mind of walking, I suggested brightly we see if we could remember our 2 times tables.  To my delight, they took up the challenge, and as we walked up endless steps, we chanted the tables to the rhythm of our stepping.  Everyone we passed noticed our strange 'walking song' and smiled and encouraged the girls on.

I've since taken to 'challenging' the girls to see if they can tell me their times tables on the swings when we go to the park - in the rhythm of swinging backwards and forwards, and also while bouncing on our mini trampoline.  They mix their times tables in with other rhymes and songs they have learnt.

Of course this is great, but they do need more practice than just reciting them in order.  So I've been looking online for some multiplication games and have found a fantastic site called Multiplication.com

It has lots of different multiplication games, like for example the fashion girls game, where you

'win' more clothes for the girls each time you get a multiplication right.  There are so many more too - detective games,  multi- player races, granny racing!! I do recommend having a look. 

How have you made times tables fun for your kids?  How do you remember learning them when you were a kid?

NB:  The recommendation for the website games is just my own personal opinion - I've not been paid or rewarded in any way for it!