Retro Educational Technology

Educational Technology of Yesteryear

noreply@blogger.com (Johne) — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 21:46:00 +0000

At VocabularySpellingCity headquarters, we collect vintage educational technology. We like to remember that we are not the first generation that is “revolutionizing” education.

The integration of technology into education has been a thrilling challenge and adventure for a hundred years now! Here’s some high points of the ongoing revolution, all items are from the VocabularySpelling Collection. Not shown in this post: an early Mac, our movie projectors, our video disc player, our collection of early educational software (Oregon Trail, Math Blaster, Reader Rabbit etc), and tons of other revolutionary technologies.

This library card catalog is our most recent addition. It was donated by a local elementary school who said it was otherwise destined for the trash.

Library Card Catalog

When I was in school in the 1960s and 70s, learning these card catalogs and the associated Dewey Decimal System was an essential research skill.

Remember this record player? Newcomb somehow seemed to have their record player box in every classroom in the country in the 1960s and 70s.

These record players were often used as part of an audio visual presentation with a film strip.

Film Strips

The records (later audio cassettes) would start by explaining that this was an audio track to be used with the film strip and that a person would need to move the film strip forward when they heard a beep. Then, they’d explain that the film strip should be on the title page at this time.

Finally, it would say that we are now going to play a beep and then you should move forward one frame.

It was a great treat to be the student who was allowed to control the film strip projector.

Another highlight of old technology in the collection is the typewriter. For a century prior to the introduction of electric typewriters, and digital word processors, there were typewriters which coupled with carbon paper, were the defacto when of creating formal documents.

I’m sure that I’m not the only one who remembers that “cc” use to mean a carbon copy of the original was made.

As carbon paper has disappeared, the term seems to have been redefined to mean “courtesy copy.”

In the Retro Educational Technology Collection, there are lots more.

Click through to see more the vintage educational tech materials in the SpellingCity HQ office collection.

A Manual Mimeograph Machine

A vital part of the educational infrastructure was the technology in schools for printing worksheets, tests, and handouts of information. In the RetroEdTech.com collection, there are a pair of mimeograph machines, both manuals which meant they had to be cranked by hand. When I was in K12 in the 60s and 70s, there were two types of copying machines in the schools. There was what we called mimeograph machines (pictured here) which produced up to 50 copies which are very memorable because of the blue ink which made the printed papers smell so nice. There were also stencil machines which produced copies with black ink and could make hundreds of copies from a single stencil

Here is a Standard Rocket 1961 mimeograph machine. I’m still looking for the electric version of this that was dominant during the 1960s and 1970s.

I’d like to mention one other set of technologies which is rarely visible in schools any more, dictionaries and encyclopedia. I have in the collection two complete sets of World Bank Encyclopedias and an old style complete dictionary.

World Book Encyclopedia 1962

A Random House Dictionary of the English Language

Laterna Magica or The Magic Lantern

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 11:50:00 +0000

Magic Lantern

I was thrilled when, in a flea market, I ran across a beautiful old Magic Lantern.

With just a bit of haggling and a surprising small amount of cash, I took it home. It turns out that eBay and flea markets are awash in these small size magic lanterns.

A magic lantern predates movies and slide. Essentially, it was a pre-electric version of a slide projector. They were popular in the late 1800s and into the start of the 1900s.

Mine is about ten inches tall, comes with the original box and slides, and has the little metal oil lantern that provided the light source.

Magic Lantern circa 1905

It appears to be a GBN toy magic lantern, similar to one that I found on the UK National Media Museum which cites a 1905 date. But mine has metal legs and a different sort of chimney. The toy ones are the ones for home use. Wikipedia says: The magic lantern has a concave mirror in front of a light source that gathers light and projects it through a slide with an image scanned onto it. The light rays cross an aperture (which is an opening at the front of the apparatus), and hit a lens. The lens throws an enlarged picture of the original image from the slide onto a screen.^[1] Main light sources used during the time it was invented in the late 16th century were candles or oil lamps. These light sources were quite inefficient and produced weak projections.

As I dug into this, I discovered online the Magic Lantern Society. They say; Introduced in the 1600's, the magic lantern was the earliest form of slide projector and has a long and fascinating history. The first magic lanterns were illuminated by candles, but as technology evolved they were lit by kerosene, limelight, carbon arc, and electric light.

I emailed them and quickly got this response: The Encyclopedia of the Magic Lantern does not cite GBN, but the companies making toy lanterns were mostly in Nuremburg, Germany. You are fortunate to have the box and slides that fit as well as the lantern. Is there an illuminant? Toy lanterns were very popular for children in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. You see them in movies such as Fanny and Alexander. Magic lanterns were once a premium for a childrens' magazine in the early 20th century. They were used both to entertain but also to teach.

Larger lanterns were used in schools, churches, Secret Societies, and as the machine that brought Illustrated Lectures of travel, science, history and religion to the citizens of towns all across the country, We estimate there were over 100,000 magic lantern showmen, ie, people, mostly but not all men, who gave lectures and shows using the magic lantern. If you go on ebay you will see the wide range of magic lantern slides still in circulation.

If you are interested in the Magic Lantern and want to know more, the Magic Lantern Society has a quarterly research Journal that it publishes and a monthly enews letter of less scholarly news. We have a bi-annual convention. If you are on the West Coast, it is a great chance to meet other collectors and to mine their knowledge of yourlantern and other interests. We are an interesting group of people who collect lanterns, or slides or ephemera or whatever about the lantern and the culture around it. It was everywhere in the 19th and 20th centuries.

This article was first published in 2012 and republished in 2025.

There is a Magic Lantern Society with get togethers and a website: http://www.magiclanternsociety.org/

UPDATE: In August of 2018, we finally tried lighting our magic lantern! And about a week after that, I noticed a Magic Lantern in the nursery of Mr. Banks' house (where Mary Poppins worked).

Vintage School Desks

noreply@blogger.com (Johne) — Wed, 03 Nov 2021 01:12:00 +0000

We all went to school and we all sat at school desks. We sat at school desks for hours and hours, days and days, weeks and weeks, months and months, and years and years.

We started sitting at school desks in kindergarten and sat at them for the thirteen years of K-12. I added four more years sitting at school desks for college and then two more for grad school.

Schools desks come in many shapes and sizes. An amazing moment for many adults is when they visit a kindergarten and they see the teeny tiny little desks. It's hard to imagine how tiny we once were.

One thing that all the school desks seem to have in common is how industrial strength they were. Strong enough to stand up to years of leaning and banging. In the old days, they were attached to the floor. I have several in which the back of one row of school desk is the desk for the row behind them.

Contemporary School Desk

When I think about school desks, I remember an odd but true story.

Rural Classroom in Sangmelima, Cameroon, Africa

When I was in my early 20s, I lived in a small town in Southern Cameroon called Sangmelima. I was a Peace Corps Volunteer. There was another volunteer in my town who was friends with a local carpenter who we called "Uncle." Uncle was a little less than responsible and he had a few kids and a wife with a very sharp tongue. One day as we stopped by, we heard her chewing him out for failing to come up with the money for the school fees, apparently their boy had just been sent home from school since the fees were overdue.

Vintage School Desk

The other volunteer and I quickly loaned him money for the fees and walked with him and his son back to the school to sort things out.

It turns out the problem wasn't just the fees but as the teacher explained and pointed out, she had thirty desks and thirty students. Although he now had the cash, the seats were quite literally, all full. So Uncle turned on the charm and she finally agreed that if she had more desks and chairs, she would accept the boy back into school. So we went back to Uncles house and it only took him a few hours to build another four school desks. We marched them over to school, set them up, and she accepted him back into school.

When I was young, I went to school in London and one of our subjects was penmanship. We had fountain pens that we would fill up with ink from the ink wells and try to carefully copy over our lessons. I was terrible. Ink would blot, I'd have ink all over my hands and sometimes on my desk and clothes. And that was on the days when I was trying not to make a mess, not counting the moments when they would leave us alone and we would flick ink at each other.

SRA, Golden Books, and Card Catalogs

noreply@blogger.com (Johne) — Mon, 12 Jul 2021 22:51:00 +0000

I took this picture in the hallway of our office. What a great collection of classic educational materials....

A Library card catalog, a SRA box and a Golden Book

Sitting on a classic elementary school card catalog, there is a box of the SRA materials with an old Golden Book and just the corner of an old World Book Encyclopedia. Does that bring back memories or what?

This is part of the RetroEdTech collection curated by the president of Time4Learning in their offices. For more info on each items:

Card Catalogs - Card catalogs were the key to every school and public library. Users could look up books by either author or title and then find them on the shelves. They conceptual organization was the Dewey Decimal System and each library had its own physical layout and maps to where to find the books. (Quoting from Wikipedia). The Dewey Decimal Classification organizes library materials by discipline or field of study. Main divisions include philosophy, social sciences, science, technology, and history. The scheme is made up of ten classes, each divided into ten divisions, each having ten sections. The system's notation uses Arabic numbers, with three whole numbers making up the main classes and sub-classes and decimals creating further divisions. The classification structure is hierarchical and the notation follows the same hierarchy. Libraries not needing the full level of detail of the classification can trim right-most decimal digits from the class number to obtain a more general classification.^[39] For example:

500 Natural sciences and mathematics

510 Mathematics

516 Geometry

516.3 Analytic geometries

516.37 Metric differential geometries

516.375 Finsler Geometry

As I read about the Dewey Decimal System today, I think of the original web directories such as Yahoo and DMOZ and wonder whether they used or leveraged the Dewey System. BTW, Yahoo's directory shut down in 2014, DMOZ in 2017 per Wikipedia.

Golden Books - The Golden Books are a great collection of kids books both story books and informational text. The Poky Little Puppy was the most popular and a particular favorite of mine. We had the 45 record of it which I remember listening to time and time again.

SRA - Did personalized instruction start with those SRA reading cards and boxes that were so popular in the 1960s and 70s? Probably not since the old one room school houses and many other educational systems presumably had systems for perssonalized or student-paced instruction. But SRA was probably a major milestone in that it was broadly used and had a defined widely used system for student paced and individualized reading. The SRA box, properly called the Reading Library Kits from Scientific Reading Associates, was a widely used system developed by Don Parker for personalizing learning and having students take some ownership of their reading. I'd like to research this more but here's a few notes from Audrey Waters Hacked Education Blog on SRA.

The cards were purposefully designed as an alternative to whole class instruction, so that students could focus on activities aimed at their particular (reading) level and move forward at their own pace. “I wanted, somehow, to individualize instruction,” Parker says in his story. Individualized instruction is often branded as “personalization....

The SRA Reading Laboratory Kit was first published in 1957, with a suggested sale price of $39.95 per box. IBM acquired SRA in 1964. It sold SRA to Maxwell Communications Company in 1988, and when the latter tried to stage a hostile takeover of CTB/McGraw-Hill the following year, the SRA assets became part of a new company, Macmillan/McGraw-Hill.

McGraw-Hill continues to publish the SRA Reading Laboratory – in print and as software – to this day. Over 127 million children have used the product.”

If you like this nostalgia, you might like reading about dictionaries and Encyclopedias.

Edison Gold Moulded Records - Very Early Record Players

noreply@blogger.com (Johne) — Sun, 07 Mar 2021 15:17:00 +0000

Here's a question that almost nobody seems to wonder about it except me. What came first, the first voice recording or the first telephone call?

The first call - at least as far as most history books go - was by Thomas Edison in 1876 who summoned his assistant with the famous line: "Watson, come here, I need you.".

The first recording seems to have been in the decades before in France but it might not count since the recording was not intended to be played back. It was intended by the inventor to be traced and looked at, a little like a photograph of the voice.

If we only focus on Edison, he made his first phone call a year before he first recorded and played back his first sounds.

A decade later, Edison launched his business selling his recording and playback devices.

In 1902, the Edison Gold Moulded system went on a sale and in 2015, I bought myself one along with some of the wax cylinders. It is sadly not in working condition.

Introducing my Edison Gold Moulded Record Machine. It basically has a cyclinder with the recording on it which spins, a needle that follows a groove. The needle connects to a metal tube which progressively expands like the end of a trumpet which amplifies the sound like a cheerleader’s megaphone. Incredibly simple!

Edison Gold Moulded Records

Edison Phonograph Cylinders

I started reading about it on the University of California website. Here's a little info:

The "Gold-Moulded" process, developed in 1902, significantly ameliorated these limitations (ed: uneven quality, limited number of quality copies etc). The process involved creating a metal mould from a wax master; a brown wax blank could then be put inside the resulting mould and subjected to a preestablished and precisely calibrated level of heat. As the blank expanded, the grooves would be pressed into the blank, and after cooling, the newly moulded cylinder could be removed from the mould. The "gold" from its namesake is derived from the trace levels of the metal that were applied as a conductive agent in creating the initial mould from the wax master. With Edison Gold-Moulded cylinders, playback speed was standardized at 160 revolutions per minute (RPM). The number of grooves on gold-moulded cylinders remained the same as for brown wax cylinders, at 100 TPI, or threads per inch.

Want to see:

- All my record players and victrolas?
- My mimeograph machines?

- My old telephones?

- My Magic Lantern?

Mid Century Modern Green Dial Telephone

noreply@blogger.com (Johne) — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 20:57:00 +0000

Thanks to Etsy, I just added a Mid Century Modern dial phone to my collection. It’s got that green color so popular in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

Click for more glimpses of my vintage and antique phone collection.

vintage and antique phone collection which includes some candlesticks and some kitschy cute 60s phones.

Want to see more vintage and antique phones from the collection?

About John Edelson and VocabularySpellingCity

noreply@blogger.com (Johne) — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 21:36:00 +0000

Hi, I’m the founder and president of VocabularySpellingCity. Around the office, they sometimes call me the Mayor. Here’s the news: We have expanded to where we are now LearningCity!

LearningCity is a family of three super cool edtech products to elementary schools. All three align to our mission of improving reading and literacy skills. VocabularySpellingCity and WritingCity are both literacy products. Science4Us also builds STEM and science skills and interest in the vital early education years while also building literacy and math skills.

All these products use game-like approaches to engage students and a variety of tools to improve teacher productivity.

For those of you that have followed us since our SpellingCity days, or who are still using our free spelling practice and automation services, I’d advise you tolook at what our Premium Membership offers. It takes the fun convenient SpellingCity framework and applies it scientifically to the critical needs in building reading comprehension of vocabulary retention. Here’s some info on that product evolution. I’d like to call out the novel technology that we created for helping students see the sounds that correspond to letters and letter combinations (patent 10,387,543).

About Me – John Edelson

I made video games for the Playstation for years including being the producer on Croc, Legend of the Gobos, a Sony Playstation game that went Platinum. One day, I decided to focus on educational software and games which I’ve been doing for almost 15 years.

The Mayor loves to visit schools and hear directly from teachers and students

I worked in Silicon Valley at legendary tech companies such as SGI and The 3DO Company. I also spent two years in the Peace Corps in Cameroon in West Africa. All this both feels like a galaxy far far away and a world that I carry within me.

I have three hobby blogs. In one, I highlight my collection of vintage educational technology like film strip projectors and mimeograph machines. I also collect playing card jokers . The third blog starts with my ambitions to earn a black belt by the time that I turned 50 (which I did) and then my efforts to stay fit since then across various sports, primarily table tennis (updated Feb 2026).

I think education should be much much much better than it is today and that technology and improved funding and management are huge parts of getting there. And I have degrees from Yale and Harvard. And I’m a pretty good listener so if you have something to share with me, give me a try. You can reach me by commenting below or finding me on linkedin where I still allow strangers to send me messages

OK, now more formally:

Seeing how students write is one of the best indicators of their literacy skills.

John Edelson is the president and founder of Vkidz Inc which includes VocabularySpellingCity, Science4Us (K-2nd Science, CODiE & BESSIE Winner), and WritingCity, a complete elementary writing program with detailed lesson plans based on the Writers Workshop approach .

He serves on the Advisory Board for the Florida Atlantic University School of Education.

He has a long involvement in interactive software, games, and simulations, starting with his years at Silicon Graphics in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

At The 3DO Company in the early and mid ’90s, he was involved in the generational video game transition from 2D sprite graphics to games with real-time 3D photorealistic graphics and physics engines.

Mr. Edelson was the producer on Croc, Legend of the Gobos, a Sony Playstation game that went Platinum. He was the turn-around manager at Argonaut – a 100-person diversified games and technology company in London. He managed it for two years, improving quality, growth, and profitability. He spun-out and joined ARC, a new company in the semiconductor intellectual property industry. Mr. Edelson, as Senior Vice President of ARC, helped the company grow from 10 to 300 people. He consulted to Vcom3D, an educational software company for the deaf and hard of hearing, as well as Time2Read, an educational software company providing standards-based online programs to elementary school systems. Mr. Edelson has previous professional experience at MID and Price Waterhouse Consulting.

John Edelson has a BA cum laude from Yale and an MBA from Harvard. He served in the Peace Corps in West Africa for two years. As the proud father of three children, Mr. Edelson has a deep interest in improving education through technology. Oh, for you academics and learning scientists out there, I’m very proud to say that Danny Edelson of BSCS, xNational Geographic, and xProfessor at Northwestern, is my brother.

VocabularySpellingCity – What is it?

Games on VocabularySpellingCity.

VocabularySpellingCity is a supplementary language arts program for building reading comprehension through vocabulary retention and building foundational literacy skills. It is compatible with most published curriculum or for schools that are building their own.

One of our touch points is the following insight into today’s educational challenges.

Seventy percent of reading comprehension problems are due to vocabulary weakness. Most schools and districts are only beginning to deal with building an effective vocabulary-building program. Many are still hoping that if the kids read enough, they’ll absorb vocabulary through exposure, context clues, and word roots and suffix knowledge (NOTE, this isn’t generally effective). Other schools work with explicit instruction but are stuck on the weekly word list routine where students learn the words for Friday but have forgotten them by Monday (both research and common sense converge in saying that this weekly cycle is not effective). VocabularySpellingCity’s mission is to help schools and districts build an effective vocabulary-building strategy and support it with effective training and powerful game-based learning tools.

Our History: VocabularySpellingCity started as SpellingCity, an extremely clever architecture and technology tour de force, which conveniently automated the weekly spelling test. Teachers and parents loved the convenience, students loved the empowerment and games.

SpellingCity built a word bank of nearly 50,000 and provided human-written and spoken sentences for each word. SpellingCity built needed capabilities for handling multiple meaning words, sound-alike words, heteronyms (same spelling, different pronunciation and meaning, ie I fish for bass while playing the bass), capitonyms (same spelling except for capitalization ie I may march in May or March), and so on. With these capabilities and both a free and premium membership, SpellingCity went viral around the country and world.

The Premium Membership – available for districts, schools, teachers, or parents – automated grading and record-keeping and provided the best games plus the vocabulary, phonics, and writing materials. SpellingCity broadened its technology base including pictures for many words and providing an automated sound by sound breakdown for each word with each sound correlated with

the right letter combinations. The learning activities including activities for phonological awareness (hearing initial and ending sounds, recognizing spoken words). SpellingCity continued to grow and usage was spread into the primary grades and across the web, Chromebooks, and tablets via the apps. After a few years, SpellingCity started searching for how to have the most impact on education by studying what the real challenges and questions were.

Vocabulary Retention Enables Through Spaced Practice

Vocabulary quickly emerged as a huge problem in education and so we focused on building programs for vocabulary-building and renamed ourselves VocabularySpellingCity. By 2016, we realized that the conventional weekly word list was largely ineffective at accumulating vocabulary. Students would memorize the words for the test on Friday but would tend to forget them by the week. In reviewing the research, we learned that a key to building vocabulary was 12-15 multimedia (hearing, reading, writing) contacts with a word over a four week period. Other research-based insights included having a vocabulary program integrated with the general curriculum and focusing on the strategic academic words, not just the impressive-sounding or even general vocabulary.

VocabularySpellingCity Today – Today, we are very focused on helping schools and districts realize their goals for improving reading comprehension, writing skills, and vocabulary. We use technology to:

Dillard Student Engaged in Word Study
Engage and empower students. VocabularySpellingCity empowers students to do their own formative assessment which is dramatically emnpowering and engaging. It’s hard for students to figure out if they have mastered a list of words and are ready for a vocabulary or spelling test. With VocabularySpellingCity, they can figure through the always-available practice tests whether they’ve achieved mastery or not, the can tell if they still have more progress to make.
Build literacy skills in an integrated holistic fashion with a focus on vocabulary-building and sound-letter correspondence. Having trouble with a word? Let’s study its meaning, sounds, or try to write a sentence with it. Students learn how words are used in context.
- Save teachers lots of time. Classroom time and homework (grading and recording and printing) time.VocabularySpellingCity is a powerful tool for building literacy skills. It enables teachers to deliver their curriculum in a manner that allows for differentiation. Without our site, it’s nearly impossible for a single teacher to successfully teach three different sets of word lists (approaching-, at-, or above-grade level), as the major reading series (Treasures, Reading Street, Reading Wonders) prescribe. And while the idea of teaching with individualized lists, using the method employed by Words Their Way seems great, it requires a massive amount of work by a teacher every week. But with VocabularySpellingCity’s Review Lists feature, creating individualized word lists for each student is simple. Students can then study the words that they need additional practice with through a rotation at a literacy center equipped with Chromebooks, PCs, iPads, or Android tablets.

Have anything you want to say to the Mayor? Just click on comments and leave me a message.

The Mayor loves to visit schools and to hear directly from teachers and educators.

Film strip were a breakthrough technology!

English: I'm Sorry!

noreply@blogger.com (Johne) — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 12:10:00 +0000

The English Language is Impossible

The English language is hard partially because of some ambiguities in key terms that are used daily. There are words that are just confusing.

Worst of all in my opinion is the word “sorry”.

I’m Sorry

The phrase “I’m sorry” can mean dramatically different things that are easily confused.

At a funeral, I might say “I’m sorry” to express sympathy or empathy for the person’s loss. But it’s not an apology or admission of guilt. I’m not suggesting that I caused the death.

If I bump into someone on a crowded bus and say “I’m sorry”, it is a sort of apology or at least a recognition that I take some responsibility for the minor mishap. At least, I acknowledge that I regret that this happened even if I’m not assuming responsibility.

However, there’s also the true expression of regret and guilt as in when I ate all the cookies when Mom had said I was only allowed to have one. Busted by Mom, I’ve been shamed and am apologizing to my hungry and cookie-less siblings with “I’m sorry”. This was an actual admission of guilt, blame, and regret. To this day, I feel guilty about pigging all the freshly-baked cookies that one time!

Back to Education

How is a teacher supposed to get her elementary school students to understand these nuances of meaning when such a critical word has such a range of frequently confused meanings?

I think the answer is to model precise use of language and then to start asking your students to do the same. If a student uses “I”m sorry” in a confusing way, a teacher can ask saying: “Are you just expressing sympathy for an unfortunate situation or are you accepting blame, stating regret, and resolving to try not to repeat it?” Of course, in the context of an elementary classroom, that would be harsh and not fully appropriate but I think you see the idea.

Real World Modelling of Being Precise with Words

As a more realistic example, a teacher could say to her students, once an ambiguous word is used: “I’m sorry that English is so hard to understand.” Then, the teacher could ask the class if they felt the teacher was:

A: Saying it is regrettable that English is so hard
B: Taking responsibility personally for having created the complexities in English
C: Both of the above

Like many multiple choice class questions, this can be discussed and then people can either vote either by a hand count or having three places in the room to go to be vote and be counted (this is more engaging for many young students and helps avoid having them sit still for too long a time).

Modelling Speaking Precisely

Personally, I could avoid saying that “I”m sorry English is so hard to understand” since it’s ambiguous if I’m taking responsibility or not for the regrettable peculiarities of English (Perhaps as mayor of VocabularySpellingCity I do have some complicity).

Instead, I should say: “It’s a shame that English is so hard to understand.” This way it’s clear that I’m expressing sympathy for the teachers and students’ heavy burdens without suggesting that I have any guilt or complicity in it. But in addition to speaking precisely, it’s better pedagogy to explain to everyone why we are choosing the words that we do.

Can "School" be more than a noun?

noreply@blogger.com (Johne) — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 12:07:00 +0000

In the VocabularySpellingCity offices, we have some exciting discussions. For instance, must the word “school” always be a noun?

What sort of bus? A SCHOOL bus!

I was in strong disagreement with an experienced English teacher (note, I have no such credentials). She argued “school” could only be used as a noun.

I spoke with some confidence: “What about school days, school bus, school boy, school books? What sorts of books would these be? They are school books. See, school can also be an adjective. Lets open up Merriam Webster and I’ll show you….”

Then, to my amazement: “Wow!….Merriam Webster lists school as a noun and a verb but not as an adjective! OK, lets try another dictionary…” The same thing! I was stupified, stumped, flummoxed, and dumbfounded.

The first two dictionaries that I pulled up online both listed school only as a noun or a verb, (ie “Would you like to be schooled in the use of dictionaries?”). Neither of these first two dictionaries acknowledged the use of school as an adjective.

Dictionary.com 2nd Meaning

Finally, I found Dictionary.com which mentions three uses of the word “school”: noun, verb, and adjective! While this seemed obvious to me, I was now aware that there was room for disagreement.

What to make of Merriam Webster? What do they think about the school bus?Merriam lists school bus as a noun. It seem that they consider these words – school days, school bus, school boy, school books – to be all open form compound word. An open form compound word? Mostly, people think of compound words as being two words joined together with no spaces or hyphens between which makes them “closed form”. Examples include butterfly, shoehorn, and windmill.

Open form compound words are compound words that are not joined together like “closed form” compound words but have a space in them. Some examples of compound words with a space in them: post office, real estate, fire engine, and light bulb.

Numbers, by the way, are a really arbitrary combination of compound word types. There’s seventeen (closed form). And twenty-three (hyphenated). And three hundred (open form) but that is not my topic for today, let’s return to the question of:

When is a word a compound word and when is it just an adjective with a noun?

I like this definition of a compound word: When two words form a new word with a new meaning. I think the functional part of this is the idea of a new meaning. For instance, a business office is to me, just a type of office. Adjective. Noun.

School Desk, a type of desk?

But a post office is not really a type of office at all, it’s a type of retail outlet so it’s clearly a compound word and not an adjective noun combination.

Real estate. I would agree that real when used with estate forms a new meaning that is different than thinking of real as an adjective. So it too is a compound word, not just an adjective in front of a noun.

But there are gray areas. Is a green box just a box that is green? Yes. What about a weak box? A mail box? A strong box?

So, back to school:

Is a school bus just a type of bus? IMHO yes. So adjective noun.
Is a school book just a type of book? IMHO yes. So adjective noun.
What about a school desk, is it a type of desk? IMHO yes. So adjective noun.
Is school work just a type of work? IMHO maybe.
Is a school house just a type of house? IMHO NO, it’s not a house at all. It’s a compound word definitely.
School day? A type of day? Maybe.

School Desk, a type of desk?

So there’s some clear cases of school being used as an adjective such as with bus or book. There’s some compound words made with the word school such as school house. And there are some gray areas where I’m not sure and I’d have to consult greater authorities. But, if Merriam Webster is unwilling to acknowledge that school could ever be used as an adjective then I (the Mayor of VocabularySpellingCity) am getting a little unsure of who this greater authority will be. Maybe my mom or brothers, all of whom seem to know grammar so much better than me. I mean I.

Now, does any of this matter? Obviously, progressive education has de-emphasized naming parts of speech. But in our gut, we all know that this sort of linguistic question being given its due is really the height of education and civilization.

Author Update – March 2018 – Noun Adjuncts

A few people have contacted me since this article was published and they have schooled me on the concept of “nouns being used as adjectives.” This is a well-known part of English which somehow, I had never learned. And I quote Wikipedia’s article on ‘noun adjuncts’: “In grammar, a noun adjunct or attributive noun or noun modifier is an optional noun that modifies another noun; it is a noun functioning as a modifier.” As I read about this, I’ve learned that dictionaries and other authorities do not agree on the gray area which covers when:

a noun is only a noun but can be used as a modifier as a noun adjunct
a noun might have transitioned into also being considered an adjective because of frequent use as a modifier
a modifier (either adjective or noun adjunct) used in combination with a noun blends together and becomes a compound word

So my school story turns out to be an illustration of this mysterious area of grammar. Thoughts? By the way, many thanks to both GrammarGirl (Mignon Fogerty is one my heroes because of the consistently high quality of her writing @GrammarGirl ) and Mary Norris (Confessions of a Comma Queen @MaryNorrisTNY) both of whom helped me understand.

April 2018 – I had some deep discussions with some educators and curriculum folk this week and I realized that I have never really gotten to the bottom of some basic student and teacher confusions. So I’ll try to spell out my question here as a step to answering it.

School is an example of a word with a single meaning but which can be used in multiple ways. School means the same thing whether we are using it as a noun, verb, or adjective. In contrast, a word like scale is a genuine multiple meaning word. To scale a mountain is quite different than the scale that we measure our weight on and both the first two meanings are distinct from the skin of the fish or the key to proportion on a map. The latter example, scale, is a true multiple meaning word or homonym. But what do we call words like school that can be used in multiple ways albeit always with the same meaning?

Examples of homonyms used in sentences:

I left my phone on the left side of the room.
The baseball pitcher asked for a pitcher of water.
The committee chair sat in the center chair.
The crane flew above the construction crane.
While they are at the play, I’m going to play with the dog.
She will park the car so we can walk in the park.

Elementary Students: Owning the Learning?

noreply@blogger.com (Johne) — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 12:04:00 +0000

One of the brightest trends that I see in education today is a broad nationwide move to have students own their learning and to adopt a growth mindset. I’m particularly encouraged to see that this is a distinct trend in elementary schools.

Learning Goals – Standards – are Posted

In school after school, in Twitter chats, during conference discussions, and in other online sharing, I hear principals and teachers citing details that convince me that this is a broad-based approach. And it’s really healthy. Since student empowerment was one of the founding principles of VocabularySpellingCity, I take just a little pride in the fact that we are helping to push this trend forward.

Here are a few places that I see the trend:

In many schools, students are made aware of their educational goals each week. It’s important that teachers set goals for the class and share them. The students are encouraged to understand the goals, why they are important, how the skills will be built, and how they will be assessed.

Four Levels of Proficiency are Posted

In an increasing number of schools, each week, teachers are posting not only the standards their students will be working on, but they also establish four levels of proficiency for each standard. These seem to be adopted from Webb’s Depth of Knowledge.

The Four Levels of Proficiency are posted in the classroom as a matrix featuring the standards, ways to demonstrate proficiency, and a hierarchy of levels of proficiency. In some classrooms, there are four sets of standards each week: language arts, math, science, and social studies.

VocabularySpellingCity and Student Ownership of Learning

Four Depths of Knowledge for a Weekly Learning Goal

As I mentioned above, one of VocabularySpellingCity’s original goals, back when we were just SpellingCity, was to empower students to be able to learn on their own. It’s hard to study spelling independently without a tool like VocabularySpellingCity. I published an article on Students Being Able to Own their Learning on their original SpellingCity Forum (now long gone) and then revisited this idea in the October 2015 blog post cited above.

More importantly, as VocabularySpellingCity focused on its mission of improving reading comprehension outcomes by helping students build vocabulary, we identified the importance of enlisting students in the strategy of building vocabulary retention (see paragraph 5) as a key step in the system.

Students can catch up, keep up, or stay ahead of their grade level by using our activities with our ready-made grade level lists for vocabulary and spelling. For example, this 2nd grade spelling word list gives 2nd grade students (or ambitious first grade students!) the opportunity to test their skills and see how many of these grade-level words they know.

These premade grade-level lists help students figure out what’s expected of them, and how they can continue to improve. Alternatively, letting students create their own lists can also be a great way to help them get motivated.

Most recently, I’ve written on how letting students create their own lists on VocabularySpellingCity helps encourage students to take control and ownership of their learning. I’ve also detailed how teachers can implement this by changing a single setting in their accounts.

If any of you have examples of how students are owning the learning in your classroom and/or photos to share, please send them along. I’ll retweet and post!

Words That Don’t Mean What They Say – Idioms!

noreply@blogger.com (Johne) — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 12:02:00 +0000

Tim Rasinski is a renowned professor of literacy education whose research on reading fluency and word study has made him a literacy hero to many. Below, he shares his thoughts on teaching idioms.

An idiom is an expression whose meaning is different from the literal meaning, like “It’s raining cats and dogs.” Find more idiom resources on VocabularySpellingCity.

Some of the most challenging words (and phrases) for students to learn are those that are metaphorical in nature – words not meant to be taken literally. Idiomatic expressions, a type of figurative language, are among the most challenging words for students to learn. Expressions like going bananas, it’s raining cats and dogs, a chip on your shoulder, and it’s all Greek to me, are not to be taken literally. The meaning of these expressions is hidden. It is up to the listener or reader to understand the underlying meaning of such expressions. Whether written or spoken, idiomatic expressions are common. Authors use idioms to make their writing more interesting and authentic.

Yet, unless the reader understands the hidden meaning of the idiom, s/he will have difficulty understanding the text in which the idiom is situated. Given the importance in understanding idioms, it seems reasonable to expect that figurative language, and idiomatic expressions in particular, be an integral part of a reading/language arts curriculum. However, if you take a look at reading and language arts instructional programs, you will find, at best, only a limited amount of coverage in any such topics. So what to do?

There are literally hundreds of idioms that are worth teaching. One approach that I might suggest is to teach idioms by themes or topics. At the beginning of the week, identify a theme that contains a number of idiomatic expressions. The website The Idiom Connection has organized expressions by theme. There you will find themes such as clothes idioms, animal idioms, number idioms, sports idioms, and more. Select (or ask your students to select) 8-10 idioms that belong to the chosen theme. Display these idioms on a chart along with their underlying or hidden meaning. Below is a chart for dog idioms.

Keep the display up throughout the week and encourage students to use the displayed expressions in their own oral and written language. For example, you might ask students to use at least one idiom in their personal journal at the end of each day. Of course, if you want students to use the expressions, you’ll need to find ways to use them yourself. For example, if a student provides an incorrect response to a question, you might say that he’s “barking up the wrong tree,” or if you don’t think the school principal will like an idea you might say, “well you just can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” or if you have a group of students who are “hounding” you with a request, you might tell them to “call off the dogs.” As you can probably see, finding ways to use these expressions is a fun challenge for both you and your students.

After having playfully used the idioms throughout the week students will probably have a good understanding of them. But if you want to take it one step further, at the end of the week ask students to work by themselves or with a partner to write a paragraph or two that summarizes the work done over the week or the plans students might have for the weekend and embed as many of the week’s expressions as possible. Here’s an example of what one student wrote recently:

“My sister and I have been hounding our parents to take us to the high school football game this weekend. Since he didn’t want to be in the doghouse, Dad finally told us to call off the dogs – he agreed that he would finally take us. However, since it is supposed to rain cats and dogs this weekend, we think we might ask Dad to let sleeping dogs lie and wait for another day to take us to a game.”

Can you imagine the fun of having students read and discuss their short compositions with their classmates on a Friday afternoon? Moreover, you can save the very best essays to share with students in the following school years. Learning to read and learning words should be fun. Bringing idioms into your classroom is sure to add joy and authentic learning to your classroom experience.

(links to resources removed)

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Tim Rasinski is a professor of literacy education at Kent State University. His research on reading has been cited by the National Reading Panel and has been published in journals such as Reading Research Quarterly, The Reading Teacher, Reading Psychology, and the Journal of Educational Research. Read more about Rasinski here. or connect with him on Twitter @timrasinski1.

Rasinski’s research on word fluency is cited in the report, “Applying Best Practices For Effective Vocabulary Instruction,” written by VocabularySpellingCity in partnership with McREL International.

Vocabulary: Shades of Meaning

noreply@blogger.com (Johne) — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 12:00:00 +0000

ince building student vocabulary skills is one of the big development areas for our company, I’m thinking a lot about how to build elementary vocabulary skills in a more rigorous and nuanced fashion.

Today, I’m writing about nuances of meaning but more generally, I’m studying the needs and standards and trying to identify ways that we can help schools practice and build vocabulary skills. Starting point: Do you have unmet needs in your schools for a supplementary, technology-based language arts program to help build vocabulary skills? If you would like to help us figure out how to help you, I’d like to hear from you. Email me at mayor@spellingcity.com.

I love that the modern language arts standards emphasize shades of meaning and de-emphasize synonyms. I always thought in school (and since) that it’s naive to teach that snicker, guffaw, and cackle are synonyms. Yes, they all describe laughter, but they do NOT mean the same thing. We all know that they mean slightly different things, so I’m pleased that instead of identifying them as synonyms, we now focus on the differences and really, what these words mean.

Core standards say that in kindergarten, students should get to act out the shades of meaning between different verbs. We will soon be providing an array of verbs that kindergarten teachers can give to students to act out. I only wish I had more time to spend in the classroom watching how much fun this is going to be, and how it will help give students a solid foundation in language concepts.

In second grade, the core standards add in adjectives: Distinguish shades of meaning among closely related verbs (e.g., toss, throw, hurl) and closely related adjectives (e.g., thin, slender, skinny, scrawny).

By third grade, they make it more conceptual to address states of mind. But they also introduce “degrees of certainty”: Distinguish shades of meaning among related words that describe states of mind or degrees of certainty (e.g., knew, believed, suspected, heard, wondered).

Notice that they do not call out or emphasize the relative distinctions such as: fast, faster, fastest. I believe it’s because while this has been a standard lesson in many classrooms and textbooks, it is an example of a dumbed-down lesson which the standards feel are inadequate in building critical thinking and linguistic skills. However, when I look at many of the vocabulary materials available, I see an inordinate focus on comparing the shades of meaning along a specific criterion.

Notice also that the example called out by the standards in third grade – the states of mind – gets students to reflect on their own states of mind. Rather than the old simplistic distinction between fact and opinion (and fiction), the standards emphasize the complexity and subtlety of all the shades of knowing or thinking.

By fifth grade, the nuances of meaning are no longer being called out, and the standards talk generally about word relationships: Use the relationship between particular words (e.g., synonyms, antonyms, homographs) to better understand each of the words.

So that’s a quick walk-through of the standards related to shades of meaning. Any thoughts on a best practice for a supplementary language arts program to help practice and build vocabulary skills in this or other areas? If so, reach out to me. Twitter works too: @VSpellCityMayor

Vocabulary: Superpower or kryptonite?

noreply@blogger.com (Johne) — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 11:57:00 +0000

Keys to Vocabulary Success

Vocabulary is responsible for 70% of reading comprehension problems in elementary schools. And while the research is clear on what most students require to build vocabulary (12 spaced multimodal encounters with a word), many schools ignore the research and reading scores suffer. Research shows that with the right techniques for word study used ten minutes a day, reading comprehension can improve by one fifth. It’s proven, low cost to implement, and takes no additional time during the school day.

* * * *

Vocabulary is responsible for 70% of reading comprehension problems in elementary schools. (source: National Research Council study, 4th graders).

Improving elementary students’ reading comprehension by building vocabulary retention is our mission. The challenge that we see across the spectrum of elementary schools and students is consistent: it’s vocabulary. In some Title I schools and schools with ESL populations, it can be Tier I words. In general education and for everyone, it’s Tier 2 words with content and academic vocabulary. No matter where the school is located or type of students, vocabulary is a problem.

A problem is that many schools ignore the research on vocabulary retention strategies. They are also ignoring common sense. We all know that “learn it for Friday’s test, forget it by Monday” is a common problem. Why bother teaching all those words if the students are just going to forget them? Some schools have actually dropped explicit vocabulary instruction (#BadIdea!) adopting the wishful and wrongful thinking that if their students read enough, they’ll absorb the vocabulary that they need. Mostly, this isn’t true.

The research is clear: Twelve to fourteen spaced multimodal encounters with words is the recipe for retention. Here are the key and necessary ingredients again:

Spaced practice over four weeks. Not lots of practice over one week. Over FOUR weeks.
Multiple encounters. Not 3, not 7: the research says 12-14
Multimodal. Just reading a word does not work. Read, write a sentence using each word, break it down by sounds or word parts, count the syllables, play games with it, say it, and read it again.

I’m going to add a fourth ingredient to the mix. Fun. Engagement. Word practice can and should me amusing and engaging. Make your classroom a funeteria. Or a funaterium. And while you are making up words as a way to make those pattern recognition engines (ie your students’ brains) work, you might also speak in rhyme, work with rhythms, sing, dance, and otherwise infuse you and your students’ days with games, joy, and engagement (more on this later. Thanks to Dr. Tim Rasinski for reminding us of the importance and possibilities for joy and how we must fight to keep study from becoming grim!). I digress but by far my favorite part of the CCSS is that starting in kindergarten, students should act out nuances of meaning. I love the idea of classrooms full of students walking / dancing / slithering / marching / sauntering / sneaking and otherwise crossing the room.

Before we get back to the research on vocabulary research, there’s a common confusion about vocabulary that I’d like to clear up. The vocabulary that’s important to learn is not the fancy esoteric elitist $5 SAT-type vocabulary words like supercilious, engender, harangue, obdurate, or ensconce. The important vocabulary words are the Tier 1 & Tier 2 words that are in common usage (often ESL students or students from language deprived backgrounds need exposure here) and the academic and content vocabulary that are the keywords to learning. For instance, many key science and social studies concepts are accessed through vocabulary words such: river, current, lake, delta, fresh water, brackish water, salt water, ocean, tide, and waves. When students learn these important concepts (ie a river has current), their ability to retain them are related to the label or vocabulary word for these concepts

Research Based Vocabulary Study – Lets start with Spaced Practice:

Vocabulary Retention Enabled Through Spaced Practice

The teachers teach ideas and concepts on a weekly cycle. The next week, they need to move onto a new topic and too often, the previous weeks vocabulary lessons and words fade away.

Here’s the concrete steps for a school or district to building a system for improving comprehension by revisiting the concepts and vocabulary over four weeks:

Train the teachers and the students. Teachers should understand the impact of paying some attention to vocabulary retention. The training should extend to the students so they too understand that the point of the vocabulary study is long-term retention, not just getting through each week’s cycle. Spaced practice, in which the students encounter these words over multiple weeks in different contexts, greatly increases the probability of retention.
Use a multimedia game-like system so that the students are truly engaged. It’s important that they can hear the words and see them used in context. Play with them. Figure out what they mean. Write with them. VocabularySpellingCity has been designed specifically to provide this spaced multimodal practice with over 35 different learning activities and games covering from writing sentences for each word to breaking each word down phonetically, from vocabulary to spelling. This variety is important if the students are going to work daily on the system.
Use VocabularySpellingCity’s system with reports for teachers, for parents, and for administrators.
- Assign activities and lists, rather than simply letting students play.
- Look at the recorded data and hold students accountable for both their level of effort and results.
- Leverage students’ reading by asking them to harvest 10 interesting words and create a list on VocabularySpellingCity. Then you can share the list with other students, and the students can teach the words to each other. (If you don’t know about student-created lists, you’re missing a key feature.)
Measure your progress. As you implement a program for increased vocabulary retention, establish a metric for measuring it either directly or through improved comprehension. One of the trends that needs to be refined in schools is to use testing to encourage and guide success. The point should be formative assessment that’s useful, not high-stakes testing that is so brutal and apparently ineffective.

If you’re interested in the research, there’s a downloadable white paper created by VocabularySpellingCity and McREL International about the field study and another on the academic research behind this approach. Better yet, if you’re interested, give us a call at (800) 357-2157 or contact us online. We can set up your district, school, or classroom rapidly, including plans for ongoing professional development and for measuring your students practice. Let’s work together to make vocabulary your students’ superpower!

Our Journey to Vocabulary

Many users have noticed that our service transitioned from being spelling-based to this new focus on vocabulary

retention to build reading comprehension. Read about Our Journey to VocabularySpellingCity. I think many schools and teachers are also transitioning along similar paths. The summary is that from our SpellingCity’s legacy, we remain committed to gamification, student empowerment, and teacher productivity. It is on this foundation that we built a system for vocabulary building fully aligned with today’s highest priority in education: improved comprehension.

The critical missing element in building comprehension (verbal and reading) is vocabulary and VocabularySpellingCity is on mission to spread the words about the importance of implementing effective vocabulary retention techniques in classrooms.

Our Phonics Patent

noreply@blogger.com (Johne) — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 11:52:00 +0000

Even as we rolled out SpellingCity, teachers and literacy coaches asked us to do more with helping students with sounds. They asked us to convert the games to focus not just on spelling practice but on practice activities for recognizing and working with sounds. They wanted help not just with the spelling of words but with learning phonics and building phonological skills. So we focused on building the tools needed for games to

help students with the sounds and the letter combinations that represent them. The goal was to give students audio visual practice with the sounds that create words helping them connect the sounds that they hear and the letter combinations that they see.

The idea was simple: We wanted to treat words like “tooth” as three blocks of letters which correspond with the three sounds: T, OO, and TH. But, as we searched, we could NOT find a system which mapped the sounds in words to the way the words are spelled. At first, this seemed unbelievable. Surely, in some university or research center, somebody had created a mapping which connected all the common English words into their sounds and mapped those sounds to the letters used to spell the words.

We spoke to a lot of people which confirmed our initial findings. This mapping did not exist. Dictionaries, for instance, routinely have a phonetic spelling of words using various systems for writing phonics. But none of the dictionaries mapped the sounds back to the actual spelling of the words. Nobody had ever done this.

Our vision came from watching endless tutors, teachers, and parents help students by pointing at a few letters in a word and having the student say the sounds that those letters created. We watched teachers help students read the sounds to decode the word and then blend them together to write them.

So, we decided to create the VocabularySpellingCity Phonics system, a novel contribution to literacy. The phonics system can be used for building a variety of prereading phonics-related skills including phonological skills, phonemic awareness, and spelling skills. Since we knew we had created something original and valuable, we started talking to lawyers. We decided in 2015 to file for a patent on our original system. We started with two provisional patent filings.

Our permanent patent is number 10,387,543, issued on August 20th, 2019. It’s called a “Phoneme-to-Grap

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dzUoFFVMCl_pPqyT1jsh34feFcLXk_am/view

Click for simple demo

hemes Mapping Patent”. It’s a utility patent covering our original method for algorithmically mapping the sounds in English words to the letters. The patent grant is both a recognition of novelty, a recognition of usefulness, and a grant of intellectual property ownership.

What is Phoneme to Grapheme Mapping?

Phonemes are the basic sounds of the English language. Examples of phonemes from the word “cheek”, would be: CH, EE, K.

Graphemes are the use of letters to express these sounds. In English, here are three different patterns of how sounds (phonemes) are expressed by letters (graphemes):

Some sounds are created by a single letter, for example, the T is “ten”. T almost always sounds the same (unless it’s in a combination with another letter like H).
Some sounds such as the long E sound can be spelled a number of ways including a double E, an E followed by an A, an E followed by a consonant followed by an E which is at the end of a word, a y at the end of the word, and an EY at the end of the word.
Some letters, like the S, can usually sound one way, like in sound, and sometimes sounds quite different, like in sugar (where it makes the SH sound)

So how can this technology help?

Students can hear and see the sounds by mousing over the sounds in each box of VocabularySpellingCity’s Interactive Phonics Boxes. Many classrooms have students first work on recognizing the initial sounds where the Sounds Boxes are used with images to match initial sounds.

The patent holders who are current VocabularySpellingCity employees are John Edelson, Obiora Obinyeluaku. and Kris Craig. For commercial purposes, the patent belongs to VocabularySpellingCity.

Holders of Patent 10,387,543 (current employees)

Activities with Interactive Sound Boxes (that use this technology): Sound It Out, Initial Sound Speller, Final Sound Speller, FlashCards, Word Study (available for logged-in students) and TeachMe More.

Sound-Based Activities for Phonological and Phonics Skill Development: Which Initial Sound?, Which Final Sound?, Initial Sound Speller, Final Sound Speller, SillyBulls, Sound It Out, FlashCards, Word

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dzUoFFVMCl_pPqyT1jsh34feFcLXk_am/view

Click to Hear the Sounds

Study and TeachMe More.

The Sound Counter Helps Students Focus on Distinguishing Sounds, Building Phonological Awareness

Education: Fluency Matters

noreply@blogger.com (Johne) — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 11:50:00 +0000

Education is often misunderstood or over simplified. This is because formal education encompasses so many different types of knowledge and skills.

One type that gets some discussion is fluency. I’m thinking of two distinct areas which seem to me to have much in common. For instance, they are both vital, they are both achieved in elementary school, and they both require lots of practice.

I’m talking about phonics skills and math facts. In both areas, automaticity is necessary. If a student takes more than a second or so to read a word because they have to slowly sound it out, then the student will not have good comprehension because they took so much time thinking about the phonics. More specifically, the automaticity of great phonics skills avoids cognitive overhead which would result in successfully decoding the words but without successfully understanding the text.

Automaticity of the math facts is almost the same thing. Once the students start talking about equations, they need to be able to whip through the math fact calculations without creating any additional cognitive overload if they are going to build comprehension of the bigger math concepts.

Fortunately, in the last few years, a few online programs have appeared which are effectively gamified and architected. They are gamified so that students want to play on the program. The games are both the practice on the math facts and an overarching point and reward system. Bottom line, kids think of these new programs as games and want to play. They are architected in the sense that they make sure that the students build proficiency for the long term. They rely on concepts like spaced practice to make sure that it’s in their long term memory. They gradually release the students to harder math facts so that they are not overwhelmed but make steady progress.

The best of these programs is Time4MathFacts. In fact, that’s the consumer version of it. This program is available to schools as Reflex Math.

Education: Sing a Song for Reading

noreply@blogger.com (Johne) — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 11:13:00 +0000

Tim Rasinski is a renowned professor of literacy education whose research on reading fluency and word study has made him a literacy hero to many. Below, he shares his thoughts on using song and music to teach reading.

“Some days there won’t be a song in your heart. Sing anyway.” — Emory Austin

Tim Rasinski shares his thoughts on using song and music to teach reading.

A few months back, my two-year-old grandson, Alex, was invited to a kid’s party. Alex is generally shy and somewhat reserved. However, once the song “Baby Shark” was played, Alex went right up to the small stage at the front of the room and, on his own, began to dance and sing for the rest of the children and adults. (I must admit, Alex has some dance moves that he needs to teach his grandpa). What a delight to see this toddler be so inspired by the music, to (without any prompting) perform in front of a large group of kids and adults, most of whom he did not know.

What this episode demonstrates to me is the power of music and song to add joy to the human experience and to show the potential for using music and song as vehicles for teaching – especially reading. Music and song can add so much to any classroom.

Music and Song are Fun – School should be an enjoyable experience for children. Most children (and adults) can find great joy in music and song. My daughter, who is getting married later this year, insists that the “Chicken Dance” and “YMCA” be part of the playlist for the reception. Sixty years later, I can still remember taking delight in singing “Oh Susanna” and “Polly Wolly Doodle All Day” in my own elementary school classroom. How about you?

Music and Song Create Community – One of our roles as teachers is to help children learn that they live in a community larger than themselves – their families, places of worship, classrooms, schools, etc. Music and song help bring us together as communities. The patriotic songs that we hear on national holidays, as well as our school anthems, help to develop that sense of common purpose that helps to define a community.

Music and Song Reflect Culture and History – So much of one’s culture and history is embedded in the songs we sing. Think of “Yankee Doodle” from the American Revolution, or the “Battle Cry of Freedom” from the Civil War, or “Over There” from the First World War. But beyond wars, songs can reflect, and even amplify our culture and history. When teaching about the Civil Rights era, how can we not expose our students to “We Shall Overcome” or the many other songs of that time? Similarly, the Great Depression was a time for songs to uplift the American spirit – think “Happy Days are Here Again” (and of course the darker side of such times as reflected in “Buddy Can You Spare a Dime”).

Music and Song can Lead to Reading – Song lyrics are a form of written text available for reading instruction that often gets forgotten. The very nature of songs and song lyrics make them especially well-suited for reading. Songs have rhythm and melody (a form or prosody for you fluency folks) that make them memorable. How often have you seen the bobbing heads and swaying bodies of children as they sing a favorite song? Why as children, on the night before an important test, did we put the information we wanted to retain into the melody and rhythm of a familiar song or poem? The words in songs can be the gateway to building sight vocabulary. Sight words are, at their essence, memorized words – by sight and sound. By introducing words to students in the context of memorable songs (make sure the words are visible to the students), we provide them with a joyful first encounter to words that will eventually be recognized by sight.

Song Lyrics for Children Rhyme – Rhyming words are, for the most part, made of what we in reading call rimes (or word families or phonograms). Teaching rhymes/rimes can be a very powerful way to help children gain proficiency in phonics. Learning “me” and “knee” from “Oh Susanna” will help children cement the “-e/ee” rime in their minds and lead to other words such as “be,” “he,” “we,” “bee,” “see,” “tee.” “Row Row Row Your Boat” contains the words “stream” and “dream.” The “-eam” word family can lead children to learn to decode “beam,” “cream,” “seam,” “steam,” “scream,” “team.”

Teachers who do find ways to make songs a more integral part of their curriculum are usually pleased with the results. For example, first grade teacher Becky Awasaki has her students learn and rehearse several songs each week. They then celebrate what they have learned each week with an end-of-the-week sing-a-long with invited family and friends. She shared with me after a year of bringing songs back into her classroom, “I have never seen so much progress in reading. All my first graders are reading at or above grade level – and they love to sing!” Her students were singing and taking great delight in songs for sure, but because the written lyrics were always in front of her children, they were reading as well.

Songs and song lyrics offer so many ways to make literacy instruction (and schooling in general) so much more joyful, varied, and effective. Moreover, with the advent of the internet, access to song melodies and lyrics for children have never been easier. So let’s certainly keep a poem in our pockets, but also let’s keep a song in our hearts – and in our classrooms!

Some Great Websites for Children’s Songs

Also, visit my website where I have posted some songbooks we use in our own reading clinic program (Camp Read-A-Lot).

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Editing Film, Old Style

noreply@blogger.com (Johne) — Sat, 08 Feb 2020 02:22:00 +0000

It's hard to believe but until around 25 years ago, every single film was edited together by hand on machines like these.

The process was careful to maintain film quality since each generation of copy, back in the analog days, was worse than the original.

So the original film footage was copied and then the original was left in a vault. The copy was cut and spliced together over and over again until the editor and director were pleased with the result. Then, the time stamps were carefully noted and the original film was spliced together. And from that original, the copies for distribution were made.

To be honest, I went through this process myself with video tape but never with actual film. And I can't imagine how the audio track was handled since there has always been sound effects and audio work added to the original shoot.

The book with all the tricks for doing title for films is a real shocker. There's all the plans for building a system to hold the camera and do a "zoom" into the title. Or to have the title appear to scroll past.

Architectural Drawing Tools

noreply@blogger.com (Johne) — Mon, 22 Jul 2019 11:38:00 +0000

I have vivid and fond memories of drawing in math class using a compass, protractor, and ruler. Do kids still do that? These memories are mixed with others of drawing accurate pie charts by hand while working in my mid 20s. I know nobody does that anymore: all graphs are now computer created.

Look what I was given this weekend. It's a set of architectural drawing tools for precise work. I know that there's a compass, I'm not sure what the other tools are called or really, exactly what they're for.

This was Lester's drawing tools during his time as an architecture students in the mid 70s as the University of Miami. A small embossed company name is on the leather package.

The first search results on Stellar Drawing Instruments shows that there is an active Ebay market in such things. A little more searching reveals an article on AmericanHistory.si.edu about these types of instruments. This is referred to as a flat case or pocket case and then the maker (Steller), number of instruments, and model might be listed. Would this be a Stellar DS4 12 Instrument Flat Case?

I'm going to go get my glasses and study this a little more but I'll post it right now so I can maybe solicit some guidance on what it is. I'm also now curious about pre plastic rules and protractors.

Speak n Spell and More Spelling Technology

noreply@blogger.com (Johne) — Sat, 06 Oct 2018 17:36:00 +0000

Here's what we have in the Retro Collection:

There's the Speak N Spell from the 1970s which we remembered thanks to its role in the Toy Story Films. I have a complete post on Speak n Spell and I have both the Speak N Spell and the Math cousin who was usppose to teach the math facts.

Speak and Spell

I also have a See and Spell. And I quote my See and Spell article: I haven't found a date on it but I'm guessing its post WWII, perhaps the 50s.

You get to spin the wheel and in each of the three windows, you can see a little picture. There are maybe ten rows, three each. The pictures are of baby, toy, dog, cat, boy, girl, bone etc

You look at the picture of the word, then you try to spell the word.

Finally you open the window to see how you did. Pretty exciting, huh?

See and Spell

I also have an array of old spelling textbooks and how tos that cover spelling. I'm never quite convinced that I should be amassing these old books since if I start, there is an infinite supply of them. Yick. Here's two.

Spelling texts

Should I add the original cover page of SpellingCity too? I guess I will. Here it is, circa

August 2009. (see the modern vocabularycity?)

And here's more info on the Speak N Spell and the Math N Spell

In terms of fun learning, here's more on The Phonics Game and other classics

Mary Poppins: A Magic Lantern in the Nursery

noreply@blogger.com (Johne) — Sat, 22 Sep 2018 19:05:00 +0000

I was watching Mary Poppins aboard a flight the other day and during the number starting with:

In every job to be done, there is an element of fun.
Find the fun and snap, the jobs a game....

And a" spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down...

Which takes place in the children's nursery, I suddenly noticed a detail that had escaped me for so many years. There is clearly a small magic lantern on a shelf in the nursery. Take a look:

Here's a close up:

Want to know about using a magic lantern or the history of magic lanterns?

And here's a picture of my magic lantern.

Magic Lantern Lit

Want to see a Victorian Era style school desk from my collection?

Morse Code

noreply@blogger.com (Johne) — Mon, 05 Mar 2018 00:59:00 +0000

The telegraph with Morse Code revolutionized long distance communications in 1800s. Coupled with the railroad, it launched the modern network era which directly led to the Interstate Highway System, the telephone system, and today's Internet.

My Dad used and knew Morse. I know:

dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot (SOS).

For my birthday, I received my own Morse Code set (thanks Diane and Brian).

Morse Code Signaling Outfit

I'm sort of surprised that there's no more websites and apps dedicated to allowing us to experience the beauty of Morse Code. Well, there's a project!

Vintage Cameras

noreply@blogger.com (Johne) — Mon, 05 Mar 2018 00:49:00 +0000

While today's youth might be unfamiliar with taking pictures with a dedicated camera, I can well remember black and white cameras, Polaroid cameras, Kodak Instamatics, bellows cameras, flash bulbs, and even developing and printing lack and white photos. And my collection is full of these. In fact, it got enriched by two new cameras in the past week.

These are Polaroid cameras before the Polaroid became synonymous with instant photography.

Selfies weren't so practical with the old technology....

John Edelson Selfie

The Polaroid Instant Camera.

Magic Lantern

noreply@blogger.com (test) — Fri, 02 Mar 2018 02:43:00 +0000

Magic Lantern Lit!

The magic of light! The Magic Lantern. In our office, we have what is known as a Magic Lantern! We fired it up this week.

Photons travelling through the air creating an image of a place, a time, where in most cases, it would not have been possible to travel to or see without the help of a Magic Lantern.

No need to rub this lantern and make a wish to be transported to a new dimension.

We take a lot for granted in the 21^st century. Roll back time just a couple of generations to the middle of the 18^th century one would see teachers using a Magic Lantern to transport their student to a place outside their classroom. Today, it’s the Internet, along with cell phones, iPads, tablets but in those days a different but special set of tech tools were required.

In order to create photons with enough lumens to create an image one would have to burn fuel. (Certain fuels burned brighter than others but that is a whole different subject).

The light from that fuel would be shine onto a convex mirror to concentrate the light and reflect it through a lens that would project the filtered image onto a screen (in most cases a wall).

In the following pictures (each picture tells a thousand words) we show you the technology behind the Magic Lantern along with images of what is required to make that technology function correctly.

Enjoy and truly appreciate what we have today!

Please Note that some items were substituted i.e lighter, scissors, newer bottle of parafin fuel and such

Want more information our Magic Lantern?

The Cootie Game

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 17 Feb 2018 18:00:00 +0000

I can remember that my cousin and I called it the ant game and in my version, the head and the body were the same color and the legs, antennas, and eyes were yellow
one of my colleagues (Kim) when she saw my new purchase from Ebay.

The Cootie game was marketed as an 'Educational Game Suitable for All Ages." It was pretty popular when I was a kid in the 60s. It seemed like every family had one.

The Cootie Game was a turn-based game that could be played with up to four players. The goal was to build assemble all the parts into a complete free standing plastic bug - a cootie. Created by William Schaper, Cootie went on the market and was a huge hit 1949 (Was there a wood version originally or was it always made out of plastic?). In 1973, Cootie was acquired by Tyco Toys, and, in 1986, by Milton Bradley which was part of Hasbro. It continues to be available in stores.

There were other cootie games sold by other manufacturers but only this one went big time. Does anyone know anything about the origin of the word "Cootie"?

Wikipedia reports that: The earliest recorded use of the word "cootie" appears in Albert N. Depew's World War I memoir, Gunner Depew (1918): "Of course you know what the word 'cooties' means....When you get near the trenches you get a course in the natural history of bugs, lice, rats and every kind of pest that had ever been invented."^[5] The word may be derived from Malaysian kutu, a head louse.^[6] In North American English, children use the word to refer to a fictitious disease or condition, often infecting members of the opposite sex.^[7]

It continues...In 1948, Minneapolis, Minnesota postman William H. Schaper^[8] whittled a bug-like fishing lure he believed had toy potential, and sold it (and others like it) in his store as a sideline to his homebound business of manufacturing small commercial popcorn machines.^[9]^[10]Eventually, he created a game around his creation, and, in 1949, molded it in plastic and formed the W. H. Schaper Mfg. Co. Inc..^[1]^[9]

Schaper offered Dayton's, a local department store, several Cootie sets^[2] on consignment^[9] and the game proved a hit,^[2] selling 5,592 by the end of 1950.^[10]^[11] By 1952, Schaper's company sold 1.2 million Cootie games,^[9] and thereafter, a million games a year.^[2]

Other Cootie Games (also from Wikipedia)...

Cootie Game, ca. 1915

Schaper's game was not the first based upon the insect known as the "cootie". The creature was the subject of several tabletop games, mostly pencil and paper games, in the decades of the twentieth century following World War I.^[9] The Cootie Game fashioned by the Irvin-Smith Company about 1915 was a hand-held game that involved tilting capsules into a trap^[9] over a background illustration depicting a WWI battlefield. In 1927, the J. H. Warder Company of Chicago released Tu-Tee, and the Charles Bowlby Company released Cootie; though based on a "build a bug" concept similar to Schaper's, both were paper and pencil games.^[9] In 1937, Rork's released The Game of Cootie, and it too was a paper and pencil game.^[9] A paper and pencil party game called Beetle is popular in Britain but its date of origin is unknown. In 1939, Transogram published Cootie, a game featuring a three-dimensional wooden bug assembled in a die-cut tray.^[9] Schaper's game was the first to employ a fully three-dimensional, free-standing plastic cootie.^[9]

Vintage Paymaster Series S-1000

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 14 Nov 2017 20:04:00 +0000

Guest blogger Jenny here! I work for VocabularySpellingCity and took my father-in-law on a tour around the office. As he admired all of the retro educational technology in the office, his immediate reaction was "Wow! This is a walk down memory lane...".

Smiling faces greeted him along the way as he met most of the office staff. His second, and most noted, observation was the pleasant work environment. He shared that observation with colleagues, friends, and family for days to come.

That evening, he called to tell me that he had a vintage Paymaster machine from Paymaster Corp that could use a good home. Being born in the 1980's, I had no idea what a Paymaster machine was, but the excitement in his voice was contagious, so I told him to dust it off and we would adopt it.

Vintage Paymaster Series S-1000

This Paymaster machine was used by my father-in-law to process payroll from 1982 - 1999. The equipment originated from Paymaster Corporation, a Chicago-based company.

Some of you may have the same question that I did, "Why is this machine superior to a simple ink pen?" A Paymaster machine was used to validate the integrity of a check. As you can see in the images below, the text is raised - almost like a notary seal.

This provided added security to prevent fraudulent checks.

The Paymaster Series S-1000 still had its original dust cover, which displayed a warning to beware of unauthorized personnel.

"Only a Paymaster distributor displaying a currently dated identification card is permitted to inspect, service, or renew the Paymaster two year Warranty. Do not void your Paymaster Warranty by allowing unauthorized personnel to service your Paymaster."

My father-in-law was happy to see that his payroll machine found a new home with fellow retro technology pieces. Thank you for donating your piece of history to us, Tom!