Students often view ESL activities as nothing but boring chores. The common English learning activities, such as — reading comprehension, writing essays, grammar studies — don’t work too well. Whenever students feel that they are learning actively, their brains automatically view the processes as daunting challenges.

In the worst-case scenario, students fall back to scrolling through their smartphones!

But if an ESL student takes unique approaches and introduces “fun” ESL activities, things change entirely. In that case, the learning process becomes intuitive and engaging.

Now, the question is — what are some fun and intuitive ESL activities? Do they even exist?

There are tons of engaging ESL activities but a good teacher will incorporate the appropriate activities to particular learners.

For example, if you ask an older ESL learner, let’s say, a 50-year-old woman to participate in a debate with a 17-year-old, she would most likely not enjoy the process. The same issue can be said about teaching English to a group of introverts.

Does it mean that a debate is a bad example of an ESL activity?

NO!   

It means that the teacher has failed to identify the insecurity of the student and followed a wrong path of action.

Today, we would take a look at some of the best ESL activities that are suitable for different age groups and personalities.

Read More: How to Learn English as an ESL Learner?

 

How to Come up with Different ESL Activities? (With Example!)

A typical ESL lesson plan aims at making the learners ready to handle different social scenarios. Generally, these plans only include some common set of statements related to those scenarios. Here, the lessons almost force the learners to memorize some preset statements!

It’s true that these activities bring in results, but at the same time, they are flawed because of using cookie-cutter strategies.

As a result, students get demotivated and uninspired from day one!

So, a good teacher should always have a conversation with the eager learners individually before beginning the lessons. Also, they must converse in the native language of the learners so that they could truly open up themselves.

Then, the teacher should create individual profiles mainly giving up hints about their personalities and experience level.

Let’s consider that Mr Kevin, the ESL trainer, has four students — Sasha, Karim, Rahul, and Hea. They all come from different countries having native languages.

Sasha and Rahul are both outgoing, extrovert, and more engaging. While Karim and Hea are reserved and introvert.

Now, Mr Kevin could ask Sasha and Rahul to teach the class. Being extroverts and outgoing, Sasha and Rahul would love to take part in this activity.

On the other hand, Mr Kevin could ask Karim and Hea to solve a fictional murder mystery by solving the clues through a long comprehension.

Sasha and Rahul are basically practicing English speaking skills while Karim and Hea are practicing English reading skills.

Once all four of them are confident with their respective skills, they can move on to mastering the next skill.

The trainer has to take responsibility for the students and set teaching plans for learning languages according to the strengths and weaknesses of his students.

 

Using ESL Activities for Improving English Skills

We all know that to become fluent in English, one has to master four individual skills —

• Listening
• Speaking
• Reading
• Writing

That means one has to first be able to understand what the other person is saying through listening. Then, he should be able to reply to that by speaking. Reading and writing are advanced skills that require proper knowledge of grammar.

So, how could anyone incorporate different ESL activities to master these four skills?

Learners of all age groups can sharper their skills using these activities —

 

Listening Activities for ESL Learners

Whenever someone is trying to learn a new language, listening skill is the first linguistic skill he/she should master. In this phase, the goal should be learning as many new words as possible.

Vocabulary is the key here.

Of course, the learner should first focus on acquiring the sight words. These words are shorter and simple to remember. Yet they count for about 90% of all the common written words in English.

So, first, they would learn the Dolch sight words and then go through the extended list of Fry sight words.

In this case, the learners could the good old flashcards.

After that, they should start picking up new words quickly. To do so, they could listen to —

• Songs with lyrics
• Podcasts
• Watch movies or foreign TV shows

The idea is to acquire as many words as possible and throw oneself completely merged in English. Make sure to get your hands on a great vocabulary app to develop a strong vocabulary base. A better listening skill also helps with improved phonemic awareness. What is phonemic awareness?

 

Want to work on your listening skills through the best audio language learning apps? Here’s complete list!

 

Speaking Activities for ESL Learners

The practice of speaking English has three key benefits —

• Using the freshly learned English words through listening in use
• Learning proper pronunciation
• Passively using spaced repetition learning process that strengthens one’s vocabulary

On top of everything, obviously, one would become adept enough to have a proper conversation in English. This is perhaps the biggest benefit of doing speaking practice in English.

However, this stage is quite challenging for shy and introverts. Being a new user, one would definitely make a lot of mistakes. So, they become very conscious about what others are thinking and refrain from taking part in English speaking practices.

If that’s the case for you, you need to overcome your fears as none can master speaking skills without having conversations with others.

And, let’s face it, you’re going to make mistakes!

Follow this simple strategy —

First, try to read different texts aloud alone in a room. This way, none can judge you. Just take any blog online and read it aloud.

Once you’re confident enough, use your phone’s recorder. Record yourself reading aloud the texts. Then, listen to the recordings and try to figure out the mistakes that you’ve been making.

Continue these sessions until you become confident enough.

Finally, you need to make real conversations with real people. You can ask one of your English-speaking friends and ask him to help with your practices. The more you have actual conversations in English, the better you’d get at speaking skills.

 

Reading Activities for ESL Learners

The reading activities are quite straightforward. All you need to do is — READ!

However, one can master reading skills only if one can completely understand the meaning of a text. Often writers will not use exact words to express certain meanings. That’s why understanding comprehensions require advanced knowledge of English literature.

For example, one might say, “I’m feeling blue.” For an ESL learner, this statement could be confusing.

After all, blue is a color and it’s not possible to feel colors, right?

True, but in this sentence, blue refers to — sadness, depression, or melancholy. So, the person saying, “I’m feeling blue,” is basically trying to say that he is feeling sad in an artistic way.

To master reading skills, you should read (in ascending difficulty order) —

• Blogs
• Magazines
• Fictional short stories
• Novellas
• Novels

There are tons of great educational websites that help students with reading skills. 

Writing Activities for ESL Learners

Writing skill is perhaps one of the toughest English language skills to master. It requires perfect knowledge of grammar and syntax. At the same time, the writer has to master the art of euphonizing.

Also, the tone and style completely change depending on — formal, informal, fiction, and non-fiction writing styles.

Think about it, you rarely think of grammar or vocabulary while chatting on Facebook with your best friend. But you spend a lot of time writing a simple 3-line e-mail for formal occasions.

This is why having a strong command of writing skill needs an immense amount of time and practice.

To sharpen your writing skills, you should —

• Read (a lot!)
• Try to have a strong command of English grammar
• Have a strong vocabulary base
• Ability to change tone and style based on the readers

 

5 Best ESL Activities for Beginners and Adults

Now, let’s focus on some of the popular ESL activities that teacher could use in the classrooms. Remember, all of these ESL activities for beginners are suited for groups only. If you’re looking for solo practice, the strategies in the previous section are better options.

Here is short list of ESL activities for group lessons. You can also find other ESL activities online.  

 

Group Debates

Group debates are perhaps one of the best ESL activities for adults. Here, the class is divided into two groups or more. The teacher chooses a topic and teams either speak for or against the topic. The teacher should allocate a fixed time to strategizing and argument presentation.

 

Teach the Class!

This is another classic ESL activity. Here, the teacher would ask the students to prepare lessons on different topics that they would present in the next class.

For example, student 1 could teach about the past tense, student 2 would take charge of the present tense, and student 3 will teach about the future tense.

 

Group Charades

This is one of the great ESL games for adults. Charades will also lighten the mood for all the students as the game very fun to play.

Here, the teacher will give the students keywords (fishing, throwing, running). One member from each group will act that verb out and their respective group members have to guess the verb.

Curious to find more fun vocabulary activities for ESL students? Here’s a detailed guide with a curated list. 

 

Yes, No!

While the game is called the Yes, No game, the only rule of this game is that students can’t answer a question asked with yes or no.

So, to answer a specific question, they will have to use elaborated sentences. As they use to come up with longer sentences as answers, their vocabulary and sentence making capabilities will increase naturally.

 

Guess the Person

Again, Guess the Person is a common party game that teachers can use in the classroom. Here, a student will have to pick a card that will have the name of a renowned person, like — Albert Einstein.

The rest of the class will have 20 chances to guess the name of that person with questions. The questions would be like — Is the person male or female or is the person a film star?  

Guess the Person can strengthen the general knowledge of the students too.

Learning a new language is all about having a strong vocabulary base. The more words you know, the better you can convey your thoughts and emotions. However, vocabulary build-up is a long and tedious process. And, in most cases, practicing vocabulary only for a few minutes will not cut it out.

You need to pick up the habit of building vocabulary on the go. That’s why a vocabulary app plays a massive role in the modern-day context.

You can have a dedicated practice hour at any time of the day or you could use your spare time for practice. The intensity of vocabulary practice is entirely up to your needs. For example, an IELTS or GRE examinee will put their heart and soul into practice. On the other hand, an average sixth-grader will prefer casual practice sessions.

That being said, we need to find the ideal vocabulary app that can cater to our needs and preferences.

So, what are the best vocabulary apps?

It depends on people’s individuality — some might prefer casual apps like Words with Friends while others need something serious like Magoosh Vocabulary Builder for their GREs.

As you can guess, we’ll discuss some of the best vocabulary apps. But rather than making a simple listicle, we’d talk about vocabulary apps catered towards different use cases and practice diversities.

 

7 Best Vocabulary Apps in Every Category

1. Vocabulary.com – Best Vocabulary App for Beginners and ESL Learners

Platform: Web, iOS, Android

Price: Free for Students, $159/year for Educators

Vocabulary.com is one of the simplest and versatile vocabulary apps out there. The specialty of this platform is its approach to teaching new words for learning new language. 

The platform focuses on context-based questions instead of flashcards or a definition-oriented teaching approach. The students then use the context to answer the question. After they submit their answer, the platform offers a simple definition and word origin for further study.

For example, let’s take a look at this question from Vocabulary.com —

The pain in his face is very evident as he struggles with his emotions.

In this sentence, emotions means:

• Refusals
• Features
• Feelings
• Problems

After the user chooses their answers, the platform offers a definition and the origin of the word Emotion.  

Vocabulary.com incorporates several questions from different angles to teach one single word. To be more specific, the platform teaches 15,000 words by offering 230,000 questions. The higher frequency of exposure helps the learners to master words more efficiently and ensures long-term retention.

As you have seen, Vocabulary.com has a premium version for educators. The premium version comes with a robust assessment dashboard.

Such features have made Vocabulary.com very popular as over 3.8 million students in 56,000 schools use this app.

 

2. Magoosh Vocabulary Builder – Best for GRE Exam

Platform: Web, iOS, Android, Amazon, Amazon Alexa

Price: Free

This English vocabulary app is designed for advanced learners, especially for the GRE examinees. However, students preparing for GMAT, TOFEL, SAT, or IELTS can also benefit from their programs.

While their overall training app is a premium offering, the Vocabulary Builder app is completely free and helps the students to master the 1,000 high-frequency GRE words.

Now, you might think that why should anyone bother learning only 1,000 words. But the thing is these words are uncommon and more relatable to an advanced learner.

For example, think of the word peevish. This is one of the uncommon words that we don’t generally see in day-to-day usage. Users often label these words as “GRE words.”

Let’s take a look at another example. If someone asks — what does base mean?

You would probably think about — a structural foundation or a military establishment or a thematic relevance. However, there is an uncommon definition of this word which is an adjective and means having low morality!

Magoosh Vocabulary Builder app works with such words. The following example will help you understand —

IMAGE

So, if you consider yourself as an advanced learner, you could start your vocabulary practice with the Magoosh Vocabulary Builder app.

Read More: Best Educational Websites for Elementary Students

3. Quizlet – Best App for Flashcard-Based Learning

Platform: iOS, Android

Price: Free (in-app purchases cost $1.99 – $47.99 per item), $2.99/month (Quizlet Go), $3.99/month (Quizlet Plus)

The flashcard technique has always been one of the best learning methods for vocabulary building. While numerous great vocabulary apps for students use flashcards like Anki or Reji, Quizlet offers by far the most intuitive option.

Apart from the flashcards, Quizlet offers a few other means of vocabulary practice.  There is a writing mode for practicing spelling and vocabulary at the same time. Plus, there are matching modes and learn and test modes that can benefit a lot of eager learners.

But the strongest feature of the Quizlet is its UI — it’s clean, modern, and easy-to-use. Overall, if you prefer using flashcards for your vocabulary practice, Quizlet is one of the best apps to get.  

 

4. Vocab1 – Best Vocabulary App with Contextual Learning

Platform: Windows and Mac OSX

Price: $67 (one-time payment for 10 years)

For an ESL learner, the useful tool for learning new words is contextual learning. One might learn a new word in a second. But the information/definition will not be stored in long-term memory if he/she doesn’t use the word in a different scenario.

This is why enriching vocabulary through contextual learning is important.

Vocab1 extensively uses contexts for teaching new words. The app follows a simple rule — they teach one word through 10 or more contexts. Apart from utilizing the contextual learning approach, Vocab1 has nine games and learning activities, rhymes, visualization tools, a built-in dictionary and thesaurus.

Overall, the app does a fantastic job teaching vocabulary through various teaching methods. Also, the pricing of the product makes it quite appealing to the students.

However, vocab1 has one issue — you can’t have it on your smartphone. Vocab1 is a desktop-only application that runs on Windows OS and Mac OSX.

Are looking for a curated list of vocabulary activities online? You should take a look at this comprehensive guide!

 

5. Memrise – Best Free Vocabulary App

Platform: Browser, Android, iOS

Price: Free, $8.99/month for the paid version ($119.99 lifetime subscription)

Although we’re mainly focusing on the Best English vocabulary app today, Memrise can help you learn 21 languages (counting only the official courses). The official courses begin with the introduction of the letters and alphabets that gradually focuses on teaching vocabulary.

Read More: How English Vocabulary App Can Help with Reading Comprehension?

Memrise utilizes two popular teaching tools — interactive flashcards, MCQ questions, and spaced repetition. Spaced repetition is one of the better teaching methods for improving vocabulary.

Another great thing about Memrise is that the Free version is adequate to teach you a new language. you’ll probably never have to subscribe to their premium version. The premium version lets you learn from actual native speakers through personalized learning.

The downside of Memrise is that the spaced repetition could be too repetitive for you. So eventually, the process might become boring.   

Otherwise, this vocabulary app is by far one of the best options out there.  

 

6. Dictionary – Merriam-Webster – Best Dictionary-based Vocabulary App

Platform: Android, iOS

Price: Free with in-app purchases on Android, $4.99 on iOS

Without a doubt, Merriam-Webster is one of the most respected English language dictionaries in the world. This app, despite being a dictionary has several features that make it a great English vocabulary app.

For example, the app has several vocabularies-building quizzes, voice-search, Word of the Day, and real audio pronunciations. These features make it one of the must-have vocabulary apps for students. Dictionary – Merriam-Webster is free to install on Android devices and quite cheap for iOS too.

So, why shouldn’t you have this powerful dictionary-cum-vocabulary-teacher on your phone?

 

Curious to know about the best language learning apps? Here’s a guide that offers a curated list with detailed reviews. 

 

7. SpellQuiz – Best Vocabulary App Younger Students and Beginners

Platform: Browser

Price: Free, Paid — $12.95/month or $119.95/year (for parents),  $15.95/month or $149.95/year (for teachers with 2 licenses), $29.95/month or $299.00/year (for teachers with 25 licenses)

Finally, we should talk about the capabilities of SpellQuiz as an English vocabulary app. SpellQuiz takes multiple approaches to enrich the English vocabulary of the students.

For example, spelling tests at SpellQuiz uses a multi-dimensional teaching approach with — dictation, writing, spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. While most other vocabulary apps focus on teaching vocabulary to advanced students, SpellQuiz is suitable for first graders, as well as, twelfth graders.

Think about Vocabulary.com or Magoosh Vocabulary Builder. These apps do a splendid of teaching vocabulary to an SAT or GRE prepper. But they don’t have any plan for teaching vocabulary to the young kids reading in grade 1 or 2.

This is where SpellQuiz outshines others being one the best vocabulary apps for teachers.

Then, with SpellQuiz, one can have an idea about their approximate vocabulary size. Vocabulary Assessment from SpellQuiz is a free tool that can give students an idea about their vocabulary size and equivalent grade level. It offers an opportunity for the students to strategize their study plan.

SpellQuiz also offers a free service called Spelling Bee Online. This real-time virtual Spelling Bee lets a student compete with others. The drive to their names on the international leaderboard motivates students to practise spelling and vocabulary.

It’s very true that every student is different and learn at a different pace. So, teachers or parents shouldn’t pressurize the young ones too hard. SpellQuiz offers a solution with Adaptive Learning where students can learn and practice spelling at their own pace. This solution is particularly great for dyslexic students or students looking for ESL activities for beginners. 

Now, students can learn idioms with examples and take part in fun quizzes for free in SpellQuiz.

Overall, SpellQuiz is one of the best English vocabulary apps for students catering to the needs of the younger students.

Writing dictation exercises is one of the best tools for teaching English spelling. Being a multisensory activity, students can develop their — listening, writing, and reading skills — all the same time.

However, vocabulary dictation or spelling dictation might be a daunting challenge for younger kids and ESL learners.

Why?

Because the students have to multitask and perform the following micro-activities —  

• Listen to the dictated sentence WITH ACCURACY
• Chunk the sentence into smaller parts in the head
• Retain the complete sentence in short-term memory until writing it
• Write it down, QUICKLY, with correct spelling
• Use proper capitalization and punctuation
• Proofread the sentence again

As you can see, writing dictation takes a lot of effort. Also, the time limit pressurizes the learners heavily because they need to write the sentences quickly before the instructor moves on to the next sentence.

This brings us to the topic of the day — how do you write dictation in English, fluently?

To improve the quality of learning, the learner and the instructor must be on the same page. If a learner struggles badly, it’s better to practice dictation in a personalized session.

 So, this guide will talk about a step-by-step process of how a parent (instructor) can improve the performance of her child’s (learner) writing dictation exercises.

 

How to PREPARE Your Child for Dictation Exercises?

One of the major mistakes that parents make is that they throw their child at practicing dictation without preparing them. A better preparation stage can make all the differences here.

So, how do you prepare your child?

First, start with oral dictations.

The idea behind oral dictations is simple — you’ll slowly speak a sentence and ask your child to repeat it orally.

Initially, you should start with shorter sentences that are three to four words long. For example, these sentences are ideal for beginners’ lessons —

He went home.

I love mango.

She is sad.

As you can see, the dictation examples in the above sentences are not longer than three words. Plus, the words are mostly monosyllabic or sometimes bisyllabic.

The oral dictation lessons help the children to grasp the overall idea behind the exercise and build a solid foundation for listening skills.

After they have mastered this stage, you can increase the number of words in the sentences. It will improve their short-term memory retention ability. Also, their working vocabulary will expand drastically.

Now, you can increase the difficulty level by using the following dictation examples —

He went home after the party.

I love eating ripe mangoes.

She is sad as she lost the game.

Once your child feels comfortable with the oral dictation, you should move on to writing dictation exercises. However, you should again start small and slowly build up.

So, rather than moving on to complete sentence dictations, you should begin with spelling dictations. Simply, ask her to write words as you speak them up loudly.

For example, ask her to be ready with the pencil and paper and speak —

My

Girl

Party

Mango

Once she has mastered this level, you can move on to the main dictation English practice.

 

A Step-by-Step Guide for Vocabulary Dictation

Many think that vocabulary dictation is nothing but multitasking. This is a misleading idea as you can easily break the whole process into a few microtasks. Then, help your child have a complete grasp over the algorithm!

Pretty soon, it will become a habit and work similarly to muscle memory.

So, what are the steps of vocabulary dictation?

Follow this simple sequence —

 

Step-1: Speak Out the Sentence, Slowly

Of course, the process of dictation starts with the speaking out of the sentence. Formally, this step is called — “dictating the sentence.”

However, as your kid is only getting familiar with the process, you should dictate the sentence very slowly. Your pronunciation should be clean. Also, give a slight pause after speaking every word.

Avoid using a rhythmic or a flowing tone.

For example, don’t say — “I went to the market.” — in one breath. Say it like this — “I (pause) WENT (pause) TO (pause) THE (pause) MARKET.”

Be loud and clear!

And, most importantly, pause after speaking out every word.

 

Step-2: Your Child Performs an Oral Dictation

You’ve already spoken the dictating sentence. Shouldn’t your child rush and start writing the sentence as soon as possible?

NO!

Rather, she should speak out sentence herself.

By repeating the sentence orally, she is essentially storing the sentence in her short-term memory for a longer period. It is one of the effective memorizing technique.

Plus, she has already practiced oral dictation before. So, this step will be quite easy and familiar to her.

 

Step-3: Write Dictation in English

Finally, she has reached the main step! This step is pretty self-explanatory — she will write the dictating sentence.

Don’t rush her.

She’ll likely face some of these common hurdles —

• Failure to understand a word
• Introduction to a new word for the first time
• Guessing the spelling of an unknown word
• Forgetting the spelling of a known word
• Misspelling a known/unknown word
• Making capitalization errors
• Making punctuation errors

As you can see, this step quite challenging. Give her enough time!

 

Step-4: Ask Her to Proofread

This step is crucial yet people often skip it out! You should urge her to proofread the written sentence.

Ask her to look for —

• Spelling mistakes
• Capitalization mistakes
• Skipped words
• Punctuation errors

This proofreading step also improves her reading skills and helps her omit to make obvious mistakes.

 

Step-5: Move on to the Next Sentence

Dictation sessions will bring in the highest result, you continue the sessions for a longer period. But don’t make it too long as it would burn her out and she would less likely participate in the dictation practices.

Start with 5 sentences in the initial phase, then gradually increase the sentence number. Once she feels comfortable, you can move on to the time-based sessions. 

 

The Hidden Step (Only for the Instructor): Evaluation

Dictation practices will only bear fruits if you evaluate the process. You should track the progress and emphasize these parameters —

• Total spelling mistakes,
• Punctuation and spelling mistakes
• Hours practiced
• New words learned

These parameters will help you re-evaluate the teaching process. At the same time, you can understand whether it’s time to introduce them to new words and broaden up their vocabulary. 

A great way to broaden up their vocabulary would be by offering them a child-friendly English vocabulary app. 

 

Don’t Have Enough Time for Dictation Practices? There’s a Full-Poof Solution!

Parents don’t always have the time to participate the dictation practices — this is the harsh truth. It doesn’t mean that the parents don’t want to spend time, the fact says that they can’t.

So, the question is — how can parents with a busy life help their children with dictation practices?

The best possible solution is — English dictation app!

There are a number of great dictation apps online that can simulate the same dictation practicing guideline that we’ve discussed earlier.

For example, let’s talk about SpellQuiz’s spelling tests. This online platform has grade-wise spelling lessons catered towards the needs of a first grader to a twelfth grader. Spellquiz is by far one of the best places for ESL activities online. 

Once a participant enters the UI, they can see a “play” button and a textbox just below it. After pressing the play button, he/she can hear a voice slowly and clearly speaking out the sentence.

Unlike most other English dictation apps, SpellQuiz uses audio created by real native English speaking voice artists. This far superior to the computer-generated audio that fails to teach the proper pronunciation.

After hearing the sentence, the participant should type in the sentence in the textbox below. To help with the process, the audio is repeated a second time at a slower tempo.

As soon as the participant has finished typing the sentence, he/she should press the “Enter” button. The tool will automatically display whether he/she has successfully written the sentence or not.

Plus, it will also mark the mistakes if there is any.

As for progress tracking, SpellQuiz keeps track of —

• Exercises attempted
• Exercises completed
• Total time spent
• Smart Score (a percentage-based scoring system that based on the number of mastered and non-mastered words)
• Mastered words in a session
• Non-mastered words in a session
• Total mastered words of a particular participant

Also, all of these pieces of information are stored in the results section.

Final Words

By this time, you should have a clear idea about how to write a dictation. As dictation is quite a hard challenge for children, you should have patience and always be supportive.

It’s also a great idea to motivate them with a positive attitude. You could even create a reward system so that your child feels encouraged to participate in the dictation practice session.  

Many parents don’t realize a simple thing — spelling activities build up the foundation for a strong vocabulary. And, a strong vocabulary leads up to having a strong command over the English language.

Those of us who can fathom the impact of spelling activities often take the wrong approach. We push our young children through a boring and repetitive path of spelling activities. For instance, we create hundreds of English spelling lists and ask our children to memorize the words, their meanings, and the spellings.

Such an approach burns out the children sooner than you can imagine! In the worst-case scenario, children straight up refuse to participate in spelling activities.

What is the solution to this case?

You need to “spice up” the spelling activities so that the children can have fun and learn at the same time. Also, we need the right spelling activities for different age groups. Sadly, most spelling activities online are catered towards the needs of the Pre-K to Grade-2 children.

We somehow neglect the needs of the older students. In reality, hundreds and thousands of older children, say a grade-7 or grade-8 student, suffers from having weak spelling skill.

These students will certainly not play with playdough or color letters with crayons!

Today, we’ll discuss a bunch of atypical spelling activities that provoke fun and age-appropriate.

 

Spelling Activities for Kids (Age Group: 3-5)

Grade Level: Preschool to Kindergarten

Preschoolers and kindergarten students are only entering the world of formal education. In this phase, parents and teachers should focus on teaching them the knowledge of letters and numbers.

If the child is eager to learn more or show higher potential, you can teach them shorter words, such as — cat, dog, eye, my, etc. The words shouldn’t have more than three letters.

Don’t push them to learn more as it might cause adverse effects. Rather keep them motivated to learn more.

The following spelling activities for kids will help them master the letters and short words —

 

Shaping Letters with Playdough

Young kids love playing with playdough. They can use the dough to create any shape. Ask your child to create the shape of letters. But don’t forget to show them how to create one in the first place. Children learn faster by observing.

Simply ask them, “Can you make a b for me?”

You can also use pre-made molds having the shape of letters. Also, you can surprise them with some tricks too!

For example, create a small d with playdough, and then rotate it to make a p, and flip it to create a b.

You can fascinate them with such neat little tricks.  

 

The Matching Game

The idea behind this spelling activity is very simple. You’ll need one of each set of alphabets, uppercase and lowercase. Then, mix all 52 of them in a box and ask your child to match the uppercase and lowercase of the same letter together in pairs.

It’s better to make the letters at home with foam as it will become a separate spelling activity. Also, you should use different colors to differentiate between the uppercase and lowercase letters. 

 

Play with LEGOs

You should already know how much kids love playing with LEGO sets. There are many alphabet LEGO sets out there.

For example, there is a LEGO set with a truck and one set of letter LEGO blocks. You can load up the truck with the letter LEGO blocks and go on a delivery!

You can come up with different imaginary scenarios and introduce fun playing with LEGO and letters together.

 

Stickers Can Do Wonders

Writing the letters and words can be quite the daunting challenge for the Pre-K kids. How about you take a different approach here?

Instead of asking them to write the letters, ask them to fill up a page with letter stickers in alphabetic order? It can be their own custom-made alphabet poster too!

You can find such stickers in any local crafts shop or in an online store.   

 

Trace the Letter!

Trace the Letter is a fun game that just happens to be one of the best free spelling activities. You don’t need any kind of accessory.

Just sit behind your child and draw a letter on her back with your finger. Then, ask her to guess the letter. You can also take turns and ask her to draw letters on your back.

This spelling activity will strengthen the bond between you and your child too.

However, you should only try playing this game after they’ve mastered the shape of all the letters in uppercase and lowercase.  

 

Color the Vowels and Consonants

This is one of the advanced spelling activities as kids will be slowly introduced to words. However, you will only work simpler words having one or two syllables.

In this spelling activity, you’ll ask your child to color the consonants and vowels in different colors. You’ll need a worksheet with hollow letters for this activity.

For example, she can color the vowels with red crayons and consonants with yellow.

This activity will serve two purposes — develop their knowledge of vowels and consonants and introduce them to new words and enrich their vocabulary.

 

Spelling Activities for Elementary Level (Age Group: 6 to 11) 

Grade Level: First Grade to Fifth Grade

The spelling activities for this age group become gradually harder and focuses more on words than letters.

As the knowledge spectrum is very broad in this group, you should start with teaching them sight words first and then gradually increase the difficulty level. So, design the wordlists with care.

The following list of spelling activities have gradual difficulty level —

 

Spelling Activity with Word Illustrations

Younger kids love their crayons and coloring pencils. So, we’ll use this trait for developing a spelling activity.

The idea is to have a list of nouns and ask your child to draw element with a coloring pencil or crayon. For example, the list might have the word swing or tree in it with a small blank space by the word. The students will draw a swing or tree in the appropriate blank box.

You can also do the opposite thing — have a list of illustrations and ask your child to write the words with correct spelling.  

As this is one of the easy spelling activities, it’s perfect for kids in the first or second grade.

 

Rearranging Words in Alphabetic Order

This one is also quite simple — prepare a list of 10-15 words and ask them to rearrange the list in alphabetic order.

For example, if the wordlist has these words — fan, mango, ram, cool, zoo, and, sting, she should rearrange them in this order — cool, fan, mango, ram, sting, zoo.

This one of the free spelling activities that develop the spelling skill and analytical ability at the same time.

 

What Rhymes with It?

Kids love rhymes and chances are they have listening to rhymes all the time in the early stage of life. Now, it’s their time to create rhymes themselves!

The spelling activity goes like this — the kids will get a list of words (that are easy to rhyme) and they will have to come up with a rhyming word.

For example, if the list has — round, van, rain, bat, the rhyming words can be — found, can, main, hat.

The same trick can be applied for ESL learners and adults who are learning new languages. 

 

Decode the Words

The idea is a bit complex but it can a lot of fun if you can use it properly. 

First, you need to prepare a list where every letter has an assigned image. For example, you can set apple for a, ball for b, etc. Then, you use the images to create a word. Finally, ask your child to solve the puzzle.

For example, you can create the word amuse using these images — apple-monkey-umbrella-socks-elephant.

To make things easier, you should have the images and assigned letters by their side.

This article helps with many other funny spelling tricks, just like this one. 

 

Find the Words

This one of the advanced spelling activities for this word groups. Most of us are already familiar with the idea, thanks to the massive popularity of such puzzles on social media.

The idea is to find as many words in a rectangle of jumbled letters. You can find many premade samples online. It’s one of the basic spelling activities online.

 

Spelling Activities for Middle Schoolers and High Schoolers (Age Group: 12+)

Grade Level: Sixth Grade and Above

As kids grow up, fun spelling activities become spelling exercises and spelling practices. At this level, simple spelling activities like coloring the vowels or coming up with rhyming words will not bring fruits. Also, students in this group should have proper knowledge of the common spelling rules and spelling tips. 

As your child is ready for the advanced spelling activities, you should introduce them to dictation-based spelling activities online. SpellQuiz poses as one of the best resources in this case. 

The spelling test lessons and Adaptive Spelling section in this website use state-of-the-art technologies that incorporate dictation English, spelling, typing (writing) all at once. The lessons are designed by linguistic experts from the USA, Canada, UK, and Australia.

Children in this age group can also be benefitted from Spelling Bee Online where they can participate in a virtual spelling bee competition. They will feel motivated as they are competing against other participants from all over the world in real-time.

Other than using the learning tools on SpellQuiz, these advanced students can take part in —

• Solving crossword puzzles (NY Times or Washington Post have the most superior crosswords puzzles)
• Play online games of Scrabble, Hangman, etc.
• Read novels and books
• Write blogs

Does your brain go to the “I am dumb” mode stumbling upon some of the tricky English words? Maybe, you’ve always struggled with spelling issues like — receive and recieve.

Every time you tell your brain that it’s receive but your brain yet again trolls you — “You know what, the correct spelling is recieve because last time the autocorrect suggested that receive is the wrong spelling!”

If this is the case, you’re not the only one!

We all struggle with some of the English words. This is because the English spellings are riddled with exceptions. Also, hundreds of English words have foreign origins.

For example, kindergarten is a German word that means garden (garten) of children (kinder). Similarly, volcano is an Italian word.

Let’s not fuss too much about the problems and focus on the solutions here. Luckily, we can use many spelling tricks to deal with confusing spelling issues.

 

Spelling Tricks That Will Make You a Genius at English Spelling

 

1. Mnemonic Devices: The Go-To Solution for Spelling Issues

There are many spelling tips and tricks to solve your English spelling problems. But mnemonics are by far the best tool that you can use.

The fundamentals of mnemonic devices suggest that you use relate a piece of information with images, sentences, rhymes, or even acronyms to remember things.   

Let’s consider the spelling of island here. This word has a silent s and kids often forget to add it.

How to solve this?

What is an island? It is land surrounded by water. If you remember this spelling trick, you will never misspell the word again.

Also, our brain often remembers the odd rules and examples better.

That’s great news, right?

Then, you can use acronyms as a mnemonic device. The idea is simple — you identify a spelling that your struggle with and come up with a silly but memorable sentence to acronymify it!

Physical, for example, confuses a lot of people as they are not sure whether to use f or ph here. You can use this sentence — Pat Had Yummy Strawberry Ice Cream And Lollipops. If you take a look at the initial letters, you’ll get the word physical.

Use your creativity to come up with acronyms that will be easier for you to remember rather than memorizing acronyms created by others. It would better if you can have a friend playing these games together. Or, you can use newly invented spelling tricks to play on friends.

The more you use and implement these spelling tricks in real life, the better you can remember them. Plus, you can make the learning process more exciting with easy spelling activities. 

 

2. Name of the Game — Find the Pattern

Yes, it’s true that we mostly misspell the unorthodox spellings. But that doesn’t mean we don’t misspell the common words too.

To minimize this issue, you need to study the common spelling rules and categorize words that follow the same spelling rules in groups.

For example, think of this well-known spelling rule. The singular nouns that have y in the end, replace the y with ies in the plural form. That means, fry becomes fries, party becomes parties, etc.

The same rule applies to regular verbs changing their forms from y to ies when the noun is a third-person singular number. According to this rule, dry becomes dries, study becomes studies, and so on.

You’re surely clever enough to recognize the pattern here. After all, our brains are fond of finding the similarities and grouping them together.

Now, try to collect all words that follow the same spelling rule into one list and try to create as many lists as possible.

This is surely a tedious process. But you’re basically aiming for two birds with one arrow here. You can bolster up your vocabulary collection and polish up your spelling skills.

 

3. Break Them Up!

Have ever misspelled the smaller words, like — ant, bat, cat, or dog?

No, right?

Mostly, we misspell the longer words. Because we need to remember longer sequences of letters. If that’s the case for you, you can always chunk them down into smaller parts. The knowledge of syllables helps A LOT too.

Think of the word disappearing in this case. You can break it up in groups like this — dis-ap-pear-ing.

Suddenly, the spelling became much easier!

You can also try the extended spelling trick here. After breaking the word into smaller chunks, you can identify the spelling pattern and group them up together.

The trick is to slowly pronounce over and over and chunk it up into smaller groups. Spelling Bee’s competitors use this trick all the time. Learn more about Spelling Bee preparation here.

Sounds confusing?

Let’s simplify things with an example. Consider the word traditional. You can break it up like this — tra-di-tion-al. Then, create a list of similar words, just like the previous spelling trick.

Like this one —

• Func-tion-al
• Fic-tion-al
• Emo-tion-al
• Sec-tion-al
• Con-sti-tu-tion-al
• Cons-pi-ra-tion-al

As you create such lists, your brain will automatically cluster them together because of the similarities among them. Thus, you can master the spelling of several words together.  

 

4. Pronunciations Help with Funny Spelling Tricks

If you ever hear a word and be asked to spell that word, you should put emphasis on the pronunciation.

The way that word is spoken can help you out with the spelling.

Think of this spelling rule for example. The silent e, in the end, makes the vowel say its name. So, that e in the end in kite, makes the i sound like /ai/ rather than creating the /ee/ sound.

All of these words follow the same spelling rule — cube, tube, bite, dive, fine, code, bode, etc.

You can use spelling tricks jokes. A very common spelling trick joke goes like this — “When two vowels walk together, the first one does the talking!”

Hmm, interesting!

Let’s test it out.

Break has two vowels, e and a walking together where e is the first one. So, break has an -eh sound rather than having the -ay sound. Coat, boat, pear, team — all of these words follow the same rule.

However, while using pronunciations for spelling words, you must make sure that you’re using correct pronunciations. Learn more about proper pronunciation here. 

For example, we often pronounce candidate like canidate! Some do the same thing with other words like jewelry or library and mispronounce them like jewelery and libary!

 

5. Create a Curated List of Foreign Words

Yes, the English language has its fair share of foreign words in it. And, most of the times you will not find any spelling rule justifying the unorthodox spelling of these words.

You should create your own list of these foreign words and use the country-of-origin tags with them. This tedious and hard spelling trick will serve you for a long time.

To help you out, we’ve prepared a small list to get you started!

10 Common German Words in English
Original Word	English Word
Kindergarten	Kindergarten
Eisberg	Iceberg
Angst	Angst
Diesel	Diesel
Über	Uber
Doppelgänger	Doppelganger
Fest	Fest
Kaputt	Kaput
Hamburger	Hamburger
Pretzel	Pretzel

 

10 Common Italian Words in English
Original Word	English Word
Vulcano	Volcano
Influenza	Influenza
Fiasco	Fiasco
Finale	Finale
Scenario	Scenario
Opera	Opera
Spaghetti	Spaghetti
Pizza	Pizza
Lasagna	Lasagna
Broccoli	Broccoli

 

10 Common Italian Words in English
Original Word	English Word
Alouance	Allowance
Aviation	Aviation
Bacheler	Bachelor
Baguette	Baguette
Ballet	Ballet
Bureau	Bureau
Débris	Debris
Énergie	Energy
Galerie	Gallery
Menu	Menu

 

10 Common Spanish Words in English
Original Word	English Word
el Lagarto	Alligator
Cucaracha	Cockroach
Fiesta	Fiesta
Armada	Armada
Vigilante	Vigilant
Cargar	Cargo
Orégano	Oregano
Cafetería	Cafeteria
Chili	Chili
Cacao	Cocoa

 

Funny Spelling Tricks for Some Commonly Misspelled Words

Now that you’re aware of some of the best spelling tricks, let’s focus on some of the clever and funny spelling tricks to tackle the commonly misspelled words.

 

Receive, Believe, Ceiling, Field — Is It EI or IE?

As you’ve seen in the introduction, these words are very tricky and our brains will often get confused and pick out the wrong option.

You can sort out this issue with one simple rule — i before e, except after c. So, it will always be ie but the rule will reverse to ei or cei if there is a c.

For example, lie, field, relief, believe uses ie but ceiling, receive, deceit uses ei.

But you can ask, “Why aren’t we using ie for words like — reign, freight, sleigh?

Good question!

It’s because of the pronunciation. These words (reign, freight, sleigh) have the /ay/ sound but the first batch of words had the /ee/ sound.

So, pay attention to the pronunciation.

 

Desert or Dessert?

If you use the autocorrect feature, none of the words has that red underline. But one word means a vast arid and sandy landscape while the other one refers to a sweet dish.

Use this trick — Strawberry Shortcake (double S) is a dessert!

 

Principle or Principal?

Homonyms are always a challenge.

Here one word (principal) refers to a person while the other one (principle) refers to an idea or rule.

Just remember, that person is your pal or a friend but rules are tough and don’t have any pal.

 

Misspell or Mispell?

Are you always dropping on s? Guess what? Miss Pell never drops the s!

 

Embarrass vs Embarass vs Embarras

Well, this is embarrassing! You the dropped r’s and s’s again!

From the next time, don’t short out on the letters, use extras, like double — double r and double s!  

 

You can think of funny stories and add them with the words that you struggle with. Here’s a tip! Make the rules silly — the sillier the better!

You can find more these tricks and tips on spelling in this detailed guide on spelling rules in English. 

Learning a new language is always a great skill to add to your talent tree. Of course, you can’t learn a new language on a whim — it takes dedication and years of practice. However, with a smarter learning strategy, you too can master a new language.

Who knows, maybe someday you will become a multilingual, or even better, — a polyglot.

But how can you learn a new language?

Do you start with the grammar and a formal learning process or do you start picking up new words of the language here and there?

Well, you need to do a bit of both if you want to learn languages. But you should understand one thing firmly — you can’t just hack your way into learning new languages. Because the hard truth is that you need to work hard and practice, practice, practice!

As you can guess, we’ll delve into how to learn a new language in today’s article. The tactics that we’d discuss today works fine for learning any language, say — Spanish, French, or Italian. But for the sake of discussion and easier understanding, we’ll use English as the example here.

Let’s start, shall we?

 

The Sure-Fire Strategy to Learn a New Language

 

Step -1: Set SMART Goals for Language Learning

Before you jump onto the details, you should strategize and come up with your language learning goals. Most of our plans never break past the planning phase because we don’t make hard-and-fast goals in the first place.

Maybe you’ve already seen this suggestion in many other blogs and articles. However, we want you to set SMART goals.

The S.M.A.R.T. goal setting is a concept deriving from management studies. This concept suggests that a goal should be — Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

Sounds confusing?

Let’s look at this concept like this —

Specific — “I want to learn English so that I can fluently have a conversation with another English speaker as I’m moving to Canada for higher studies soon.”

Measurable — “My target is learning 10,000 common English words as it covers about 95% of the day-to-day vocabulary.”

Attainable — “An average native English speaker knows about 30,000 words but it’s too hard and I want to settle with 10,000 common words.”

Relevant — “I am planning to move to Canada where English is the dominant language and want to communicate with others fluently.”

Time-bound — “My semester starts next fall. So, I have about six months to learn English.”

This is just an example and you can create your SMART language learning following the same strategy.   

 

Step-2: Conduct a Vocabulary Assessment  

Conducting an assessment is crucial for any language learning. Chances are that you already are familiar with a lot of words in that language.

Let’s think of some of the English words. Most foreign-language speakers are familiar with words like — apple, ball, cat, dog, fan, etc. This is because English is an international language and it has influenced people from all over the world to learn some of the common words.

Now, the question is — how many of the common words do you already know?

Participating in an assessment test is a viable and logical approach here. SpellQuiz offers a great solution too. It has a free vocabulary assessment section that lets you know the estimated size of your vocabulary assigns you a grade level within just a few minutes.

This estimation will help you with your language learning goals too.  

 

Step-3: Find a Reliable Source for Enriching Vocabulary

Any language learning process is based on four pillars — listening, speaking, reading, and writing. It’s always better to start with mastering the listening and speaking skills.

Why?

Because these two skills enable you to have a conversation with another person. So, you see, vocabulary building is the foremost step for learning new languages. 

Also, you should understand that every language has a long list of “common words.” For example, the English language has a list of 1,000 sight words that covers about 90% of the common words seen in the day-to-day English texts.

Linguistic experts have developed different lists of sight words having different word count.

The Dolch Words and the Fry Sight Words list are two of the most notable lists. The first list contains 220 service words and 95 high-frequency nouns. Then, the Fry words list is the extension of the first list and has 1,000 words in it.

You can take help from the Sight Words section of SpellQuiz where you can find the complete lists that you can download. After you have practiced the words, you can participate in sight words spelling exercises.  

Also, SpellQuiz boasts of a massive database of 15,000 English words that are sufficient enough to make you a fluent English speaker.

Read More: 7 Vocabulary Building Strategies that Work!

Step-4: Engage in Conversations

Different language learning programs have premade curriculum. Such cookie-cutter methods might or might not work for you. It often puts you in a hit or miss situation!

Without a doubt, having conversations with real people is still the best practical method of learning a language. Your conversation partner could be another learning like yourself or could be a native speaker.

Having a one-hour conversation is more helpful than hours of premade practices and doesn’t bore you to death!

Yes, you’ll make tons of mistakes and often will make fool of yourself. But it will serve you better as you’re constantly implementing different words in practical use. The more you use a word in a conversation, the better you retain it in your memory.  

You can learn more about the strategy in this article where we discuss how long does it take to remember a word?

 

Step-5: Find a Personalized Learning Program  

Like we said in the earlier section, cookie-cutter learning programs often don’t work for everyone. If that’s the case for you and you can’t find a conversation partner, you should find yourself a personalized learning program.

Again, SpellQuiz has a great solution to this issue. SpellQuiz’s adaptive spelling program lets the user learn at his/her own pace. Also, the participants can track their progress through a visual representation of their progress.   

 

Planning to use apps and the best language learning websites to learn a new language? Check out this guide now!

Step-6: Practice a Lot!

Learning a new language demands a lot from you and without the proper intensity of practice, you’ll fail miserably.

So, brace yourself as you’ll need to practice a lot!

It could be spelling practice, spelling test, or simple grammar lessons — anything! The idea is to keep practicing on a constant level regularly.

For example, you should have at least 4-5 language learning sessions every week and each of these sessions should about 3-4 hour long!

If you participate in an intense practice in a week and then do zero practice in the next week, your brain will forget most of the things that you’ve learned.

 

Step-7: Introduce Variations

Most of the time people quit their efforts to learn a new language as things become too tedious and boring.

That’s why you need to introduce variations.

For example, you can play word games or participate in fun quizzes. Also, if you’ve been participating in spelling lessons too much, you can take part in a spelling competition.

SpellQuiz has a Spelling Bee Online section where anyone can participate in an online game of spelling bee. The players play in real-time against each other and the winners can have their name on the global leaderboard.

So, the gist is that you should use various approaches to reduce the monotony.

 

Step-8: Let’s Enjoy a Movie!

This is perhaps the most interesting and effective language learning method of all. Many of us learn languages without even noticing by using this approach.

The idea is very simple — watch movies, TV shows, cartoons. You’ll get entertained and passively pick up hundreds of new words, phrases and idioms.

Also, don’t forget to turn on the subtitle in your native language. Try to establish correlations among the actions on the screen, spoken words, and the subtitles. Continue this process and you’ll notice patterns.

 

Step-9: Evaluate Your Learning Progress regularly

As you continue with your language learning activities, you should occasionally track your progress to see if the learning efforts are bearing fruits or not.

These evaluations not only reflect your learning efforts but also the effectiveness of the learning tools too. It’s possible that your current learning tools and approaches are not bringing in results for you.

In that case, you need to change the learning strategies.

Some of the important progress tracking parameters are — mastered words, non-mastered words, time spent on the learning efforts, type of learning activities that you’re participating in, and so on.

The good news is that SpellQuiz’s progress tracking tool keeps tabs on all of these parameters and more. For example, SpellQuiz assigns a SmartScore based on your master and non-mastered words.

 

Final Thoughts

Most people stop their language learning efforts after a few days or months as they find the process too tiresome.

Please don’t join that club!

Rather, we ask you to do the opposite embrace your failures. You’ll forget the already mastered words; you’ll misuse the words and form completely meaningless sentences.

But failure is an integral part of the learning process. You can’t succeed without failing countless times in the first place.

We hope all success to your plan of learning a new language.

As an ESL learner, you might’ve stumbled upon hundreds of ads and guides saying that one can become fluent in English in just a month or two. ‘The experts’ often boast of their secret hacks and tricks that work like a charm.

Sadly, those promises are nothing but marketing gimmicks! Otherwise, you wouldn’t have to slog through articles after articles trying to learn English.

The harsh truth is learning English is a daunting challenge and it would probably take years to ‘somewhat’ master it. To give you a hint, let’s talk about the approximate number of total words in the English language.

Shakespeare, the famous writer had an impeccable vocabulary and his books had over 30,000 unique words in them. However, even native speakers don’t use that many words in in a typical day.

It’s true that knowledgeable native speakers have an average vocabulary of 30,000 words. But the most common 10,000 words represent almost 95% of day-to-day English words.

So, considering all of the facts, the 15,000 words in the SpellQuiz database is adequate enough for the ESL learners to be fluent.

Hundreds and thousands of people are learning and even mastering English as a second language. If they can do it, so can you! All you need is a sound plan towards your goal of learning English and be dedicated to it.

What Does It Mean to Learn English?

Before you start following a language learning scheme, you should first set your goals and expectations.

In simpler terms, ask yourself, “Do I want to understand and speak English while traveling abroad or do I want to become a fluent user of the language?”

This is the MOST IMPORTANT decision that you need to make.

Why?

Because you can only learn a couple of hundred to about a thousand words high-frequency English words or sight words and somewhat communicate in English.

You can communicate in English with a small vocabulary consisting of some common verbs and nouns. Try to master the 315 Dolch sight words first and then gradually master the 1,000 Fry sight words. These sight words cover about 90% of the day-to-day English words.

You might ask, “Why is this article only talking about words? I want to learn the language? Shouldn’t I focus more on grammar?”

Yes, you’re right! But only to some extent.

Words are the basic elements of any language and the primary tools for communication. The grammar will only help you structure and euphonize your thoughts.

Why Traditional Language Classes and Learning Methods Aren’t Effective?

Most ESL learners seek help from English language classes. It’s an intuitive move — if I want to learn something, I join classes for it!

While the traditional language classes and learning methods do help, they’re not as effective as you think.

Surely, you’re getting a bit confused now!

Let’s take a look at a practical example again.

A traditional class for ESL newcomers focuses heavily on teaching situational conversations. It mostly covers topics like — self-introduction, situational survival vocabulary, and often covering scenarios that you might ever face!

Teaching these topics are important but the flaw remains in the method of teaching. In most cases, the teacher shows images and then defines the term with a word.

The issue is that only ‘memorizing’ words doesn’t help you master it. You might remember that word for maybe a month or two but you’ll eventually forget about it.

You MUST use the new words in a sentence in a conversation. In that way, your brain associates external factors, like specific situations or conversation to that particular word. It helps you master that word, not just memorize it.

The same can be said about flashcards. It allows you to memorize the word but doesn’t help you anyway with implementation efforts.     

Also, traditional classes have cookie-cutter curriculums that might or might not work with your capabilities. As a result, classes eventually classes — boring and uninspiring.  

Surely, you need structures and guidelines but they have to be personalized — tailored towards your needs.

The Language Learning Strategy That Actually Work

Do you remember how you learnt your first language — the mother tongue?

Probably not!

You were hearing new words every day, then, your brain correlated the words to actions and different objects. After that, you started using the words vocally. At first, you couldn’t form sentences — there were only simple words.

Then, you started forming short sentences and gradually started mastering longer sentences. After having somewhat command over the hearing and speaking capabilities, you moved on to the reading and writing skills.

Right?

You’re not the only one — we all have learnt our first language in the same way.

Let’s call it the natural process.

We need to implement this exact strategy in our English learning strategy. However, there is an issue. Our brains are more rigid towards newer information and knowledge.

So, the best thing that we can do is mimic the same stimulation and train our brains to follow that similar path once again!

How to Learn English Effortlessly?

Now, let’s talk about the elephant in room.

How can you use the natural language learning strategy to learn English?

That brings us to the most important segment of this article — dissecting the natural language process and a step-by-step guide to ‘master’ English.

Step-0: Identifying Your Current Level of English Proficiency

This initial step stands true for all ESL activities or development efforts. Before you start working on your English learning venture, you need to define your current level of English proficiency.

You can do this by asking yourself some simple questions, like a checklist —

• How many English words Do I know?
• Can I participate in a simple conversation in English (doesn’t matter if you’re only using a few words to express your thoughts)?
• Do I recognize the English letters and alphabet?
• Can I read English texts?
• Do I have the understanding of tense and sentence structures?

As you can see, the difficulty of the tasks in the checklist increases gradually. The findings from this questionnaire help you identify your current level of proficiency. After the identification, you should set up some clear expectations from your English learning efforts.

For example, if you can express your thoughts using only verbs and nouns but can’t form complete sentences, you should aim at mastering that.

Similarly, if you can form simple sentences complying with the subject-verb agreement, you should learn and implement advanced words to euphonize the sentences.

It’s all about continuous improvement.

However, there is an issue with this strategy!

You can’t quantify or measure your proficiency level. Think about it — if you could get a numeric reference to quantify your vocabulary level, wouldn’t that be great? Only after having an idea about your vocabulary size, you can participate in vocabulary building activities. 

 

To bolster your learning efforts, you should use English language learning websites and apps. Here’s a complete list of the best language learning apps. 

How SpellQuiz Helps with Vocabulary Assessment?

SpellQuiz proposes a practical solution with a smart vocabulary assessment test online.

The free online tool asks you to do one simple thing — listen to a sentence and type in the sentence in the textbox on the screen. After repeating the same process a few times, the smart tool tells you your approximate vocabulary size and an estimation of equivalent English level from Grade 1 to 12 to adult.

The sentences are curated by a team of linguistics experts from the United States of America, Canada, Australia and UK. Also, it uses actual sentences spoken by human voice artists rather than opting for computer-generated sounds. It’ll help you with the correct pronunciation too.

Step-1: Start Gathering (Listening) English Words

Do you remember the first phase of the natural language learning process? All you did was listen to others speaking a language to express their feelings.

You need to do that same thing again.

So, start watching English movies and TV shows. And, don’t forget to turn on the subtitles. At first, you’d feel completely overwhelmed with the ‘new’ kind of sound and should I even mention the sudden exposure to the number of foreign words?

Slowly but surely, you’ll be able to identify specific words and be able to guess the meaning too.

A plethora of anime lovers learn Japanese using this strategy. They don’t even try to learn the language, yet it happens effortlessly.

Step-2: Get Accustomed to the Sight Words

Now that you’re already learning English words casually with movies and TV shows, it’s time to hit the books.

This part is a bit tricky as you’d need the knowledge of letters and word formation now. Simply speaking, you need to have a basic reading skill here.

Otherwise, you can use Google translator or any other translator application to help your out here.

The idea is to get accustomed to and hopefully master the Sight Words in this step. Why is this step so important?

Sight words are the most commonly used English words. There are two popular lists — Dolch words and Fry words. Dolch sight words the simpler and only has 315 words. Fry words list, on the other hand, has a total of 1,000 words.

You should note that the Fry words list also has all of the Dolch words in it. These words are so common that they count for about 90% of the day-to-day English texts.

After mastering this step, you’d be able to have small conversations with an English speaker.

An ESL student should also be aware of the common spelling rules for adults in this phase of learning.  

How SpellQuiz Helps with Sight Words?

SpellQuiz understands the value and importance of sight words very well. That’s why it has a complete collection of sight words in the Words section on the website.

From this section, you can see all of the sight words in one place. Also, these word lists are downloadable, meaning you can download and print them for offline practices.

But only knowing and memorizing words will not do you any good. You’ll eventually forget them.

To solve this issue, SpellQuiz special spelling tests for sight words. Here, you can take part in the exercise and implement the sight words.

Still, you should use these words in real-life situations. And that brings us to the next step.

Step-3: It’s Time for Conversations!

The best way to learn a language is by having conversations in that language. This stands true for English language learning too.

Sadly, you’d a partner for it. You can partner up with another ESL learner as it would help both of you at the same time.

Conversations act as intense and short language learning sessions if used with a dictionary and corrections. You’ll feel more motivated to speak and have conversations with an actual person than a guided audio tutorial or bots.

Here’s an additional tip for you, if you learn a new word, try to use that word a few times in the conversations. That word will retain in your brain permanently.

Surely, you’ll make A TON OF mistakes, but guess what, mistakes are your best friend now! Only after making silly mistakes and having numbers of awkward conversations, you can hope to learn English one day.

Embrace the mistakes — just let the other person know that you don’t speak English and don’t intend on being offensive accidentally.

Step-4: Practice, Practice and Practice

No matter what you do, you can’t learn English in a whizz! It takes time and you should give it ample time.

Learn new words, use them in conversations, learn the spelling, practice the spelling, write something fiction or non-fiction — keep yourself busy with different practice efforts.

You’ll get there!

How SpellQuiz Helps with Practices?

SpellQuiz offers all kinds of vocabulary and spelling tests and practices. If you’re a beginner, you can start with grade 1 practice sessions.

The difficulty increases gradually all the way up to grade 12. It even has a separate section for the adults.

All of these exercises and practice sessions are based on listening dictations and writing them down. So, it develops your listening and writing skills all at the same time. And, there is no doubt that writing dictation exercises is a great way of practicing English for ESL learners. 

Does competition boost your motivation?

Good!

Then, you can participate in the Spelling Bee Online competition. Here, students from all over the world participate in a virtual spelling bee competition in real-time and the global leaderboard keeps track of all the best competitors.

Now, that’s motivation!

On the contrary, you might be a bit shy and don’t want to embarrass yourself with your mediocre English proficiency. In that case, the adaptive learning feature will allow you to learn at your own pace.  

The later addition of SpellQuiz is the Idioms section where students can learn about quirky phrases that will help them euphonize sentences. As idioms don’t refer to the literal meaning of the words, SpellQuiz uses images, different meanings, and examples in a sentence for better implementation.

Step-5: Evaluate Your Progress

As you work hard learning English every day, you check your progress every now and then. It will help reevaluate your initial learning goals and efforts and set you on the right track.

What parameters matter while progress tracking?

You need to know how many hours you have put in your learning efforts so far. How many new words you have mastered or failed to master? What is correcting and failing ratio?

All of these parameters matter.

There are a number of online applications that can help you with the tools for tracking.

How SpellQuiz Helps with Progress Tracking?

SpellQuiz has a robust tracking feature. If you browse through the reports section, you can check out the tracking parameters.

SpellQuiz helps you with the following information —

• Activity duration
• Total number of correct words
• Total number of incorrect words
• Type of activity participation and the total number of activity participation
• SmartScore
• Number of attempts
• Global ranks
• Word statistics

Final Words

Learning English is a tedious challenge that demands time and patience. If you follow the right strategy and learning approach, the knowledge will remain in your memory for a long, long time.

And, at the end of the day, it matters the most.

So, say no to the shortcuts, hacks, quick tips and all of those gimmicky strategies. Embrace the long and hard path and you can become a better English language user eventually.  

Parents often struggle with preparing their young children for kindergartens.

Think about it — you need to teach your kids A LOT OF things — numbers, letters, alphabet, shapes, reading, writing, and what not!?

And, it’s quite normal!

Also, kids will often prefer watching their favorite cartoons and play some games. If you force your kids to learn new thing, chances are that your plan will backfire! Moreover, there’s not a single parent who would want to stress the tender minds of their four-year-olds.

This is why early learning platforms like ABCmouse is so beneficial.

What is ABCmouse?

ABCmouse is one of the most well-known early learning platforms for young kids at the pre-school and kindergarten level. This online early learning academy focuses on bolstering the educational base of the children belonging to the age group of 2 to 8.

But you already know this piece of information, don’t you?

Let’s jump on to the main topic today — ABCmouse review.

Is ABCmouse worth it? Does ABCmouse truly help your child? What are some of the good alternatives?

We know you have a lot of questions on your mind. After all, it’s not a free platform and you only want THE BEST for your children.

Here’s how we’d review ABCmouse today —

• What is ABCmouse?
• Core features of ABCmouse
• What did we love about ABCmouse?
• Scopes of improvisation for ABCmouse
• Best alternatives to ABCmouse (paid and free)
• SpellQuiz vs. ABCmouse: a direct comparison

What is ABCmouse? An Introduction to the Platform

ABCmouse is an online educational platform that specializes in catering to the academic needs of children from age two to eight.

With 10,000 learning activities and 850 complete lessons, ABCmouse is one of the richest collection of educational contents online. You can find lessons on all of the core academic subject areas, including — literacy, math, science, health, and social studies, as-well-as a plethora of art- and music-based activities.

The ABCmouse curriculum has won awards like — Mom’s Choice GOLD Award, the Teachers’ Choice Award, and the Parents’ Choice GOLD Award.

Also, in the second quarter of 2020, ABCmouse has reached another milestone. Now, it’s the most downloaded kids’ learning program on iOS and Android. Even giants like Khan Academy, Duolingo, and YouTube Kids are behind ABCmouse!

ABCmouse is the flagship program of the successful company Age of Learning Inc. Both the Age of Learning Inc. and the ABCmouse program were found back in 2007.

Age of Learning Inc. is a massive company — achieved the unicorn startup status in 2016 with over $1bllion valuation!

To give you an idea, let me talk about the current CEO of the company, Paul Candland.

Before joining Age of Learning Inc. in 2019, he was the President of The Walt Disney Company, Asia and Japan, respectively for over fourteen years! He also served as the President of Okinawa Pepsi Cola.

Naturally, ABCmouse has a strong curriculum board consisting of multiple national and international award-winning educational experts and teachers.

So, there’s no doubt that ABCmouse is a capable and resourceful company.

Core Features of ABCmouse

The best thing ABCmouse is that the platform offers an all-encompassing experience. Once you log on to the platform, you instantly see a UI that resembles a classroom — where kids are busy in different activities and the teacher is welcoming the user.

In an instant, the user gets the message that kids can do different fun activities here. Also, you’ll notice that interface uses many bold and strong colors. That colorful world will surely attract the children.

Now, let’s move on to the exciting features of ABCmouse – 

It Starts with a Virtual Avatar!

As you enter the UI, the user, mostly the child gets to create a virtual avatar. This avatar is quite important, as you can easily track the progress of your child with this avatar. All thanks to the interactive menu system.

The creation of the avatar does two tricks — the child gets a vibe that ABCmouse is more about doing the fun activity than “studies” — and, set the initial point of learning with ABCmouse.

The Learning Path and Leveled Learning

As soon as the user creates the avatar, he/she is ready to take on the plethora of activities in ABCmouse. Also, ABCmouse uses a structured learning path to prepare the child for school.

The path starts from the Preschool stage (age 3) to the 2^nd Grade stage (age 7). This path consists of 10 separate levels and kids have to take part in a sufficient number of activities.

It bolters the leveled learning feature. With the award-winning teachers behind the creation of the curriculum and learning path, things are quite balanced and well-structured.

Fun Activities with Animated Videos

As I have said before, each level of the learning path consists of numerous different activities. ABCmouse used its strong animation team to introduce fun.

For example, we all know that learning letters and the alphabet is one of the first educational activities. ABCmouse has an animated activity where ‘Prospector Paul’ and his trusty mule Trauss find letter combination together.

Then, there’s a video where King Grammar teacher basic and simple grammar rule to his villagers.

These activities are fun and intuitive. Kids in most cases view these activities as games but actually get to learn a lot.

Different Activities Catered Towards Different Educational Concept

ABCmouse doesn’t have any shortage of learning activities. As you can guess, the massive collection of 10,000 activities is the biggest selling point of ABCmouse.

Here, this brief list should help you understand their style of work —

Reading and Language

• Letter identification with uppercase and lowercase
• Phonics and phonemes
• Word families and rhyming words
• Sentence formation
• Parts of speech (the knowledge of noun, pronoun, adjective, determiner, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection.)
• Basic grammar

Mathematics

• Number recognition
• Counting from 1 to 120
• The decimal or ten-base number system
• Addition and subtraction
• Basic geometric shapes (lines, square, circle, triangle, hexagons, etc.)
• Length, time, and money measurement

Science and Social Studies (The World Around Us)

• Parts of body
• Trees and plants
• Animals around us
• Seasons and weathers
• Maps and regions
• Earth’s environment and geography (the knowledge of mountains, deserts, hills, ocean, lakes, rivers, swamps, etc.)
• Solar system
• Matters and the properties (solid, liquid, and gas)

As you can imagine, having a good base knowledge of these educational concepts will boost your child in early education.

A Kid-Friendly Library

ABCmouse boasts of having a resourceful library that has over 450 books in it. Apart from the traditional stories (The Lion and The Mouse), they also have original and non-fiction books.

These original books help to empower the imaginative powers of the kids and introduce them to a world of knowledge, adventure, and fun.

Songs and Music

Kids inherently have a weak point for songs and music. ABCmouse has a fair share of music and songs in their collection.

These songs include classic children songs and their original songs that help the children learn letters and words.

Arts and Crafts

Here’s the thing — kids love colors and paints. Just like many other platforms, ABCmouse also has hundreds of coloring pages, dot-to-dots, paint-by-numbers, traceable, and printables.

These premade arts activities will make them more interested in drawing and painting in the real world.

Progress Tracking

When your child is using an online learning platform, you need to make sure what are they learning and how much are they actually practicing. So, having a progress tracking feature is a must these days.

ABCmouse progress tracking window lets you know the number of activities that your child has taken part in, as well as, their academic progress. The academic progress is shown through pie charts — of reading, math, the world around us, and arts category.

The Ticket System  

When the kids complete a learning activity, they get tickets as a reward. They can use these tickets to purchase virtual items and pay visits to the zoo.

This ticket system helps to motivate them to take part in more learning activities.

Interactive Zoo, Aquarium, and Farm

To make things even more interesting, ABCmouse has includes three exciting virtual places — zoo, farm, and the aquarium for the classroom.

The zoo boasts of having real-life animations of animals like — elephants, lions, monkeys, zebras, penguins, and more. Kids can learn about them and even interact with them. Chances are your child will love spending time in the zoo.

Do you remember the classroom that we’ve mentioned before?

That classroom has an aquarium too!

Children can have different exotic fishes there. They can learn about the fishes and can purchase new fishes for their aquarium with reward tickets.  

Lastly, your child can visit the interactive farm. The farm has the same mechanics as the zoo. But it has different animals, mostly farm animals — horses, chickens, cows, and more.

What Did We Love About ABCMouse?

With the massive number of features, there are so much to love about ABCmouse. Check out the following list —

An Ocean of Activities

ABCmouse has by far the highest number of learning activities among the online-based early learning platforms. The platform covers almost every aspect of the educational concept. Apart from the basic educational concepts, kids have lessons on arts and crafts.

After all, not every online platform can’t say they have over 450 lessons spread through over 10,000 activities.

Fun Games and Interactive Functionalities

Although the platform boasts of educational contents, kids love spending time in the interactive zoo and the farm. These fun activities induce the right amount of fun while offering scopes of education.

COPPA-Compliant

As a parent, you must be worried about the platform for having COPPA-compliance certifications. The good news is that ABCmouse has COPPA-compliance certification (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act).

So, what does it mean?

It means your child will not see annoying pop-ups leading to potentially dangerous contents for children online. Also, the app doesn’t have any in-app purchase option available.

So, you can leave your child alone learning things at ABCmouse.

An All-Encompassing Approach

We have seen different learning platforms specializing in one or two things at max. For example, some platforms specialize in STEM studies, some specialize in English grammar.

But ABCmouse follows an all-encompassing approach — it covers all of the education concepts necessary for a preschooler. This is one of the strongest suits of this learning platform.

Professionally Curated Curriculum

ABCmouse is the flagship platform from one of the unicorn startups of the world with an over $1billion valuation. It seems that ABCmouse has spent all those money on experts and education gurus from all over the world. ABCmouse boasts of having a large group of experts designing the leveled-learning-focused curriculum.

Easy-to-Navigate

One of the major complaints against a lot of online learning platforms has been the unintuitive UI. Surely, an adult can surf through different segments of learning platforms. However, things are not so simple for a child especially a child who is in the preschool stage.

ABCmouse solves the issue with a fully interactive and straightforward UI. Also, with the use of bright-colored animation on the menus, things become even easier.

They have put much effort to make the interface as simple as it gets while making it intuitive enough. So, it’s a huge plus point for ABCmouse.  

Scopes of Improvisation for ABCMouse

While we have loved a bunch of things about ABCmouse, there are certain things that the developers can upgrade. Obviously, no platform is perfect so you shouldn’t think of these “improvisation” points as pure negativities.

No Freemium Feature

Yes, ABCmouse is a premium platform and with so many great features, it’s only fair for the developers to ask for money. However, there is no way to test out the platform beforehand.

Also, it doesn’t have any freemium feature that everyone can enjoy. All of the features are locked behind that paid subscription banner.

Yes, they do offer a one-month free trial but you’ll have to enter your payment information to even have a glance at how the platform works.

Controversies with the Payment System

ABCmouse has been accused of running unlawful marketing and billing practices over the last few years. Numerous parents have complained about the billing system as they can’t cancel the subscription.

Some parents have said that ABCmouse has billed them for multiple years in the beginning without consent and the customer support refused to offer refund money.

As tension grew, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) intervened and investigated the issue. On September 2, 2020, FTC released a press release stating that Age of Learning, the company behind ABCmouse will pay $10 million as compensation fee to FTC.

Recurring Activities

Some users have complained against the platform offering recurring activities every now and then. As a result, their kids stopped using ABCmouse as it seems boring to them.

Not Suitable for Older Kids

The lessons and activities are so simple that it becomes obsolete even for seven-year-old kids. These lessons are perfect for children below grade one. But the older kids the activities and lessons are so simple that it feels unchallenging.

Best Alternatives to ABCMouse

While ABCmouse is an exceptionally great learning platform despite the negative press, some other options offer similar or even better features.

You could check these learning platforms that might appeal to you –

Starfall

Starfall is by far the best alternative to ABCmouse. It also focuses on the same children group, K-3. But Starfall doesn’t have such negative press surrounding its reputation. Also, the pricing and billing systems are more transparent.

Moreover, Starfall has several free apps available online that shows dedication and determination towards education.

Khan Academy

Khan Academy another great platform for online education. It is a multiple international award-winning platform that caters to the needs of children of all age group. So, Khan Academy doesn’t become obsolete after a few years.

Plus, the best part of Khan Academy is that the platform is free and follows a non-profit agenda.

Pear Deck

Pear Deck is another new name in the industry. It’s a platform where teachers can teach and help kids in real-time. Pear Deck uses interactive slides where teachers and students work together.

Yes, Pear Deck is more suitable for older children but the concept is solid and K-3 teachers can also use it to help young minds.  

 

Looking for more websites like ABCmouse? Check out our detailed Spelling Classroom review. 

SpellQuiz vs. ABCMouse: Direct Comparison

Truthfully, you can’t compare ABCmouse and SpellQuiz directly. As these two platforms are entirely different and cater towards the needs of different student level, it’s almost like comparing apples to oranges.

For example, SpellQuiz is an online learning platform that specializes in English spelling and vocabulary targeted towards K-12 and adults. On the other hand, ABCmouse is an online learning platform for preschoolers.

So, a direct comparison is invalid here.

 

However, you can take a look at the features of SpellQuiz —

Vocabulary Tester

SpellQuiz lets the user test their vocabulary level. Within just 10 minutes, after a number of spelling tests, the SpellQuiz algorithm figures out the approximate word collection of the test taker.

Also, the vocabulary test is completely free and anyone can use it!

Comprehensive Spelling Tests

SpellQuiz has one of the richest spelling test and practice arena available online. These spelling practice and tests are classified in grade-wise categories so that students can instantly start practicing at their current vocabulary level.

Spelling Bee

Spelling Bee is one of the most exciting spelling competitions in the world. SpellQuiz is one of the few online learning platforms that has dedicated practice grounds for advanced spellers.

Apart from the Spelling Bee practice sessions, anyone can join the Spelling Bee Online competition. Here participants from all over the world take part in virtual Spelling Bee in real-time.

Also, participants can check their global rank and spelling level. Plus, the leaderboard will show their names — it gives them a sense of glory and achievement.

Adaptive Spelling

Not everyone learns at the same speed. To help out the comparatively weaker students, SpellQuiz has introduced an Adaptive Spelling feature where students can learn at their own pace.

Superior Reports and Analytics

Yes, ABCmouse has a progress tracking system but SpellQuiz’s reports page is far superior. It offers results in microlevel.

You can track the progress based on these parameters —

• Activity duration
• Total number of correct words
• Total number of incorrect words
• Type of activity participation and the total number of activity participation
• SmartScore
• Number of attempts
• Global ranks
• Word statistics

More Than Spelling

Although SpellQuiz is dedicated to spelling, it comes with educational contents of other academic concepts such as English grammar, geography and more!

Idioms and Phrases

The idioms section is the latest addition of SpellQuiz. This section helps the students with common idioms and with meaning, images, and examples. The illustrations help the students to memorize the meanings of the idioms better.

 

Long gone are the days when students had to slog through manual and traditional learning methods for improving spelling skills. Thanks to advanced online platforms, kids these days can learn English spelling with much enjoyment and fun.   

Among some of the better online, interactive platforms for improving spelling skills, Spellzone is a prominent name. Spellzone follows and structured pattern that works like ‘virtual teacher’ for the young students.

There are many special and unique features that make Spellzone different from the other platforms. However, Spellzone is not a free platform rather almost all the features locked behind that premium subscription.

That brings us to the main point of today’s article – a detailed Spellzone review. This review will be divided into 6 parts –

• What the core features of Spellzone?
• How should a student utilize the functionalities to unlock the full potential of Spellzone?
• The features that make Spellzone better than other platforms
• Scopes of improvisation
• Best alternatives of Spellzone
• Is SpellQuiz a good alternative of Spellzone? A head-to-head comparison between Spellzone and SpellQuiz

Before we jump onto the main review section of Spellzone, let’s try to learn about Spellzone first – what is Spellzone, what are the mission and visions of Spellzone, and how does Spellzone work?

 

About Spellzone – History and Team Members

Spellzone is an online learning platform specializing in British and American spelling skills. The platform wishes to become an all-encompassing source of knowledge students can learn individually at home, in school, or on the go.

Spellzone is an experienced company that started its journey back in 2002. And, the company is based in York, United Kingdom. In the early days, Spellzone mainly wanted to fill in the gaps of traditional learning approaches – mainly catering towards the needs of the older students and adults.

Shireen Shuster was the pioneer who found the company. The exceptionally qualified teacher and dyslexia specialist poured all her knowledge to help teenage students overcome their spelling problems. Initially, the platform was entirely dedicated towards the older students as this group students aren’t fond of the ‘childish’ learning software.

Currently, the core team of Spellzone is comprised by Barry Perks (Development Director), Tarot Conway (Technical Director), Avani Shah (Content Creator), and Ross Georgeson (Illustrator). Al of the team members are exquisitely qualified educators and driven.  

 

The Core Features of Spellzone

Spellzone follows a three-step teaching methodology. These steps are –

• Spelling Ability Test
• Spelling Course
• Word Lists

 

Spelling Ability Test: Assessment Ensures Better Learning

In the first step, students are encouraged to take the ‘Spelling Ability Test.’ Any good teacher first tries to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of an individual student. Spellzone does the same thing in this step.

Spelling Ability Test presents the students with about 70 dictation-based question. Here, students go though an audio-enabled test session. Upon opening the test UI, they hear a word and a sentence containing that word. Then, the students have to enter the correct spelling in a text box.

This step repeats until the algorithm reaches a conclusive point. After this test, students get a ‘Spellzone score’ and an individual course pathway.

This step performs three crucial tasks –

• Assess the prior knowledge of an individual participant
• Offers student-oriented course pathways
• Performs automatic re-testing in a periodic manner

Basically, the step figures out the ability of the individual students. This concept is almost the same as the SpellQuiz Vocabulary Test. But rather than offering a suggestive grade level and several other tracking parameters like SpellQuiz, Spellzone offers a course pathway. Also, SpellQuiz uses human voice-over artists while Spellzone uses computer generated audio.  

 

Spelling Courses: The Virtual Spelling Teacher!

The Spelling Course section ‘teaches’ the students different spelling rules and guidelines. Think of this to be a ‘virtual teacher.’ The courses are divided in two major groups –

• Starter Course
• Main Course

The Starter Course, as the name suggests, teaches all the basic rules regarding phonic spelling rules and various multi-sensory activities. There are a total of 8 lessons that follow easy-to-hard ranking. Both children and ESL learners can benefit a lot from this basic Starter Course.

Then comes the Main Course which is aligned with the National Curriculum in England. The Main Course is spread in 36 units and they are divided into 3 levels –

• Basic Level – Discusses the basic spelling rules — i.e., spelling choices of /er/ sound (er, ir, ear, or er), spelling choices for /air/ sound (air, are, or ear). There are a total of 16 lesson units in this level with 6 test sessions.
• Intermediate Level – Teaches the tricky and confusing spelling rules — i.e., the ‘i’ before the ‘e’ rule, word with silent letters (wrap, comb, sign, knight). There are a total of 8 lesson units in this level with 4 separate test sessions.
• Advanced Level – Teaches the most complicated and advanced spelling rules — i.e., word endings with -et, -ot, -ate, -ite, word endings with -ant, -ent, -ence, -ance. There are a total of 12 lesson units with 2 test sessions.

These 36 lesson units covers almost all the spelling lessons seen in the English language. Mainly, all of these lessons start with the spelling rules regarding the issues. A detailed spelling list follows the ‘rules section’.

Finally, once a learner is confident enough, he/she takes the spelling test covering the spelling rules in that particular lesson. Once the learner passes the test, he can advance to the next lesson.

Based on the score of the ‘Spelling Ability Test,’ the algorithm assigns a course level to the participant. The spelling course is very adequate and covers all the spelling rules in English spelling.

This is the core approach of Spellzone when it comes to teaching a learner about the English spelling.

 

Did you like this review so far? If so you can check out our detailed analysis of Spelling Classroom website review.

 

Practicing with Spelling Lists

The spelling skills are dependent on regular practices as we have discussed in the article on ‘how long does it take to remember a word.’ So, a student needs word lists to keep on practicing.

This is where the ‘Word Lists’ of Spellzone comes to play. Spellzone has different types of word lists –

• Course Word Lists – Specific lists of words that align with the Spelling Course lessons. Here, you can find a total of 34 lists.
• Curriculum Word Lists – These word lists are designed in accordance to the national curriculum in England, GCSE-oriented, English literature based, Scotland’s SQA based, US-standard grade based (grade 1 to 9). These lists are adequate enough for a typical school-going child.
• Vocabulary Lists – These word lists are niche or genre oriented. For examples, the vocabulary words found in the animals’ study, arts, business, geography, math, weather, etc.
• Lists by School, College, and Organization – This category is quite self-explanatory. Spellzone has a plethora of word lists that are suitable and provided by the individual school’s curriculum. The only issue here is that all the schools are based in UK. So, students coming from other parts of the world will not get the most of these lists.
• My Lists – Spellzone offers an opportunity to create custom words lists for every individual for practice. These lists can be created by individual learners, the parents, or teachers. These lists particularly help to master the difficult of hard words that learners struggle the most with.

 

Multi-Approach Learning Tools for the Words Lists

Spellzone offers multi-approach learning tools for mastering the words lists. There are a total of 5 different tools to help a student –

Look, Say, Cover, Write, Check – This is the basic practicing tool. Here, the students will first take a ‘look’ at the word. Then, they will speak aloud the word, after listening to the recorded word. Next, the word and the sound will be hidden and students will type in the word. After pressing the check button, the UI will tell if the student is correct or not.

  

Spelling Games – Here, students can learn and practice the words from a specific list through different word games. There are a total of 15 games and each game follows a different path to teach the spellings. In the loadout screen, there are instructions for playing the games. Younger students will enjoy playing the games as they learn while having fun. Older students might find the game too childish and are likely to stick with the regular learning methods.

Listening-based Spelling Tests – This step is very straight forward. Upon loading the UI, a prerecorded voice speaks a word and a sentence containing that word. A student has to enter the correct spelling of the word in the text box and check. The UI also shows the list of correct or incorrect words.

Printable Worksheets – These are worksheets that students can print and practice offline.

Handwriting Worksheets – These worksheets are just like the previous ones — downloadable and printable. But rather than only offering a list, it teaches how to write the letters and words using ‘arrowed,’ ‘solid,’ and ‘dotted’ lines.

 

What We Loved About Spellzone?

Spellzone has almost 20 years of experience working in the industry and it is one of the oldest platforms dedicated towards improving English spelling skills.

Of course, Spellzone is veteran and there are a lot things to love about Spellzone. Here are some of the brilliant features that we absolutely loved!

 

Starts with an Assessment Point

It seems like a simple and basic feature but it makes all the difference in user experience. Students are NOT always in line with their grade level in terms of knowledge and skills. Some are ahead in the curve, while some struggle and lag behind.

For example, a student ‘X’ might be in grade 6, but her English skill might that of grade 8. It’s very much possible.

So, she should pick up the practice sessions from the level of grade 8, not from the level grade 6. This would make her even stronger in the English spelling skills.

Spellzone understands this strongly recommends the users to begin with the Spelling Ability Test. There are a number of inferior platforms that ‘blindly’ starts teaching the learners.

Kudos to Spellzone!

 

Teaches All the Common Spelling Rules

Rather than being a platform solely dedicated towards practice, Spellzone tries to teach all the spelling lessons. This is remarkable as Spellzone can serve the purpose of a teacher who first teaches and then tests the abilities of the students.

It’s a unique feature that is quite rare to find in the modern platforms that specializes in the English spelling.

 

A Massive Collection of Words Lists

Spellzone boasts off its high volume of words lists. Apart from the 1000s of preloaded words lists, there’re over a million custom, user-created word lists on their website.

 

 Multi-Approach Testing Tools

One of the biggest reasons behind the popularity of Spellzone is the multi-approach tests. Most of the available online platforms have one or two testing mechanism. Spellzone, on the other hand, has five different types of testing tools. We think this is the second biggest strength of Spellzone after their Spelling Courses.

 

Following Curriculums

Spellzone’s spelling practices are very effective in the real life because the courses and the word lists are made in accordance to the national curriculums of England, Scotland, and the United States of America. Then, comes the issue of affiliation with the individual school’s curriculums. Spellzone follows school-based curriculums of hundreds of schools from the United Kingdom.

 

A Dedicated Spellzone Dictionary

Another big strength of Spellzone is their dictionary section. Spellzone has its own dictionary and it is very, very rich.

What’s more?

It comes with a ‘Scrabble Score’ to inspire the student even more.

 

Spellzone Guides and Resources

The interface of the Spellzone is not-so-intuitive and a new user might feel too confused and might even overlook some of the best features of Spellzone because of the mediocre web design.

Spellzone solves this issue by creating simple and straightforward guides to use their services.

Also, Spellzone has some very useful spelling resources. Yes, the number of these resources are quite limited but the quality of them is top-class.

 

Scopes of Improvisation for Spellzone

There is no such thing as perfection. Just like every other spelling platform, Spellzone also has some notable issues. We want clarify that we don’t want demean Spellzone but want them improve more for better user experience.

 

Hard-to-Navigate User Interface

It’s true that Spellzone has several guides to get the most of their services. But the basic interface quite unintuitive. It might be a bit tough for the kids. Also, some of the important features are located are on the bottom, while some options are available on the menu bar on top. Again, the blog section is located at the mid-point of the homepage.

If you want to find all the features in single place, you’d struggle a bit.

 

Results Overview Could be Better

Spellzone has a separate results page that allows to keep track of the login time and number of activities participated by a user. The progress tracking or the results feature is very crucial someone wants to reach excellent level of spelling skills. Also, parents and teachers can benefit a lot from these progress tracking features.

That being said, the reports are not comprehensive enough. It doesn’t offer an overview of how many words a user has mastered, or how many of the words the user has failed to spell correctly.

There are many platforms that offer more comprehensive reports.

 

Computer-Generated Audio Seems Lifeless

Spellzone uses audio-based or dictation-based spelling lessons and tests in a lot. However, Spellzone uses computer-generated audio which feels lifeless and boring. Also, in many cases, students can’t understand the proper pronunciation.

If they can replace the robotic sounds with the human voice-overs, the lessons and tests would become livelier. At the same time, students can practice and improve their pronunciation.

 

Lack of Mobile App

Currently, students have wonderful mobile applications that they can use via their smartphone and tablets. The rise of iOS- and Android-based hardware urges the online platforms to create mobile applications.

Students can benefit a lot from a Spellzone app designed for mobile devices.

 

What Are Some of the Alternatives to Spellzone?

While Spellzone is an exceptionally great learning platform, there are some other options that offer similar or even better features.

You could check these learning platforms that might appeal to you –

 

SpellingCity

SpellingCity is one of the leading platforms for learning spelling and vocabulary. This platform is known for comprehensive spelling lessons dedicated to the K-12 students. Compared to Spellzone, SpellingCity has massive number of word games. Then, SpellingCity’s cross-platform features and mobile application is very strong. SpellingCity will also impress you with the Flipped Classroom feature.

 

HowtoSpell

As Spellzone is special platform targeted towards the adults, HowtoSpell becomes a great contender against Spellzone. Just like Spellzone, HowtoSpell is also focused towards the adults and teenage learners.

You can take a look at their services and features.

 

Spelling Stars

When we compare the services and features, Spelling Stars is quite similar to Spellzone. Learners can practice spelling online, take spelling tests, and create custom spelling lists. Just like Spellzone Spelling Stars also has a progress tracking tools with rich reports and analytics.

 

SpellQuiz vs. Spellzone: Is SpellQuiz a Good Alternative?

Despite being a much newer platform, SpellQuiz is growing rapidly. SpellQuiz not only has most of the features of Spellzone, but also comes forward with abundance of additional features.

Here’re the features that make SpellQuiz a viable alternative of Spellzone –

 

Better Vocabulary Tester

SpellQuiz challenges Spellzone with its own Vocabulary Tester. Both of the platforms follow a similar method of vocabulary testing.

However, SpellQuiz asks the users to write down the complete sentence with proper capitalization and tracks of the progress using countable parameters in real-time.

Spellzone, on the other hand, demands the users to write a specific word only. Moreover, SpellQuiz gives an estimation of probable vocabulary count and grade level. So, one can easily have an idea about their current vocabulary collection.

Human Voice Artists

As we have mentioned before, Spellzone uses computer-generated audio for the lessons and tests. SpellQuiz, on the other hand, uses native English speaking voice artists from the USA and Canada.

So, SpellQuiz’s audio lessons and tests become livelier and more vibrant. Also, learners can learn proper pronunciation from native English speakers. As a result, overall experience becomes much richer.

 

Wider Collection of Spelling Tests

Both of the platforms have spelling tests, but SpellQuiz wins with higher number. SpellQuiz boasts of having one of the widest collections of spelling tests, exercises, and lessons.

 

Special Lessons for Sight Words and Spelling Bee

Sight Words extremely important for young learners and ESL learners. As these sight words comprise of most of the common written and spoken words in the English language. SpellQuiz has a dedicated tab for learning and practicing these sight words. Students can also download and print these sight words for offline practices.

SpellQuiz understands that students have a keen interest in Spelling Bee competition. And, a lot of students put extra effort learning English spelling to do well in the Spelling Bee competitions. That’s why SpellQuiz has special practice arena for Spelling Bee and one of the richest Spelling Bee guides available online.

 

The Opportunity to Learn at Own Pace

Not every single student has the same caliber. Some are better and faster, while struggle to match their peers. SpellQuiz Understands the case very well.

SpellQuiz has introduced Adaptive Learning where students can learn at their own pace. The practices start from the very basic level and the sessions get adjusted according to the capabilities of the learners.

This feature is also extremely helpful for the gifted children and the student suffering with learning disabilities like dyslexia.  

 

Special Care for Adults and ESL Learners

Adults and ESL learners are quite different from the young school-going children coming from a native English-speaking country. So, their lessons and exercises should be different.

SpellQuiz has different sections for the adults where they can practice more comfortably.

 

Superior Reports and Analytics

Both of the platforms have reports section, but SpellQuiz is clearly the superior option here. While Spellzone only tracks the activity duration and number of activities participated by the users, SpellQuiz tracks –

• Activity duration
• Total number of correct words
• Total number of incorrect words
• Type of activity participation and total number of activity participation
• SmartScore
• Number of attempts
• Global ranks
• Word statistics

 

Video Tutorials

Compared to the written guides on how to use the website of Spellzone, SpellQuiz uses video tutorials. Also, in the video library, students can learn about interesting spelling tips and tricks.

This is big advantage of using SpellQuiz over Spellzone.

 

Online Spelling Bee

Spelling Bee Online (SBO) is a unique feature of SpellQuiz where students from all over the world can participate in the virtual spelling bee competition. This feature not only makes them better prepared for the actual competition, it also induces fun and thrill to the learning process.

The best part is that SBO section is completely free!

 

SpellQuiz is NOT Just for Spelling

SpellQuiz boasts of two special features that go beyond spelling. First of all, students can participate in the fun quizzes that teaches them word origins, conditionals, geography, and many other things.

 

The next is the Idioms section — which is a new feature SpellQuiz. Here, students can understand common idioms and phrases with examples. The images, meanings, and references come together to help the students memorize the idioms faster.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With the rise of online-centric lifestyle, homeschooling practices are yet again becoming popular. Even two decades ago, we had to rely on different institutes to have an access to education. But those barriers have faded now.

Yet we struggle!

Suppose you’ve decided to take the homeschooling approach for your child. What would you do? Buy some age-appropriate books online and focus on straight-forward education?  

Of course, you can do that!

But there are many other paths available that might just offer more efficiency. In fact, your homeschooled child can outwit her peers following the alternate paths.

However, there are many factors in play here. Keeping updated with trends in the educational world is perhaps the most important factor.

And, the best way to stay updated is to enrich yourself with the best homeschooling resources online. Please do know that I’m not talking only about the homeschooling curriculums and educational materials that you can find online.

You need to enlighten yourself with the different educational philosophies and learning methods too. Afterwards, you can explore different online learning resources and the best educational websites. 

So, you see, we need to take a step-by-step approach here. I will walk you through the following concerning topics. I hope to offer an all-encompassing guide regarding the best homeschooling resources online.

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Educational Philosophies and Teaching Models for Homeschooling

 

Educational Philosophies and Teaching Models for Homeschooling

Let’s talk about a scenario first.

A child is born and somewhere around three to four years of age, the parents teach her letters, alphabet, and maybe counting. The kid soon gets admitted into an elementary school and studies age-appropriate materials. After excelling, she moves to the next grade. Thus, the cycle continues.

We consider this approach to be the standard.

After all, we have taken the same route – learn basic language skills, study logics (math and science), and finally, use that knowledge to delve onto the advanced education.

Finally, after we have an adequate level of education, we start our work-life. So, you can divide everything into two halves –

• Learning Period – The initial part of life where we obtain knowledge
• Implementation Period – The later part of life where we implement all that knowledge

We, the parents, often live under a common misconception.

What is that?

We think that traditional educational philosophy is the most advanced and modern approach to educating. It’s true but not in every case.

We need to truly understand that every individual and one single educational approach will not bring out optimal results for everyone.

The biggest strength of homeschooling is that you can follow a custom method the bring out the best in your child. Many educators and experts have explored different educational philosophies. Some work just perfect, while others seem obsolete in today’s environment.

 

The Classical Approach/ The Trivium Method

We all are already familiar with the classical method. This method is so common that it sometimes become synonymous to homeschooling!

What is the core concept of the Classical Approach?

In one simple word – Reading!

The Classical Approach tries to educate a person through the Great Books of the Western Worlds using the Applied Trivium method.

The Trivium method is based on three pillars –

• Grammar
• Logic
• Rhetoric

In Biblical sense, the pillars are as follows –

• Knowledge – Gathering information
• Understanding – Arranging the information into a logical sense
• Wisdom – Using the information into practical use

Let me simplify!

A student will learn grammar and basic language skills so that he can receive information accurately. This stage lasts for about six to seven years.

Then, the student will start to develop better logical senses and become more capable of analyzing things better. In this stage, students will become adept in math, science, and history. This stage typically lasts for three to four years.

Finally, the student will advance to the rhetoric stage. Here, students will master prudent judgement and analytical skills. They will learn to take initiatives and innovation, ask questions, and partake in intellectual discussions. Typically, this stage is three to four years long.

But what books do the students read?

They will rely on the Great Books of the Western Worlds. It’s a collection of the most influential ideas and books. The texts include books from ancient Greece and Rome to Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

The final edition of the series that was published in 1990 includes 60 volumes. However, students don’t generally read all the books in this collection. It’s a guideline only.

Also, you should know that this educational philosophy is heavily inspired by Christianity and Biblical ideologies.

 

Online Resources for Classical Approach

• Well Trained Mind – Follows the modern practices
• Classical Christian Homeschooling – Follows the traditional/biblical practices
• The Critical Thinking Co. – Focuses on developing critical thinking abilities of the students

 

Charlotte Mason (CM) Method

Charlotte Mason was a British educator and reformer from the 19^th century. She thought of a different educational philosophy that focuses on three things –

• Atmosphere
• Discipline
• Life

A key point of this method is incorporating “nature walks” and “nature journals” with the short sessions of the actual study. Also, “living books” is a key concept in this educational philosophy.

Charlotte Mason believed books should be well-written, should contain inspiring messages, and most importantly, MUST touch our emotions. These are the traits for a book to be truly alive.

The CM method is more of a self-exploring journey by the means of connecting with nature and reading soulful books.  

However, there are a few major drawbacks of this method.

 

Drawbacks of Charlotte Mason Method

First, the CM method is very ineffective when it comes to STEM studies. For similar reasons, the Charlotte Mason method is a bad choice for the middle schoolers and high schoolers. It’s a great choice for the children up to ten- to twelve-year-olds but no for the older ones.

Second, the method is heavily Christian centric. As result, it fails to become a universal solution for all humans in the world. The non-Christian parents might struggle to find adequate resource materials for their children.

Third, the CM method is almost obsolete for people living in modern urban areas. The method asks the students to explore nature, taking a walk in the greens, and filling the nature journal. It’s really not feasible for an urban child living in an apartment to explore nature.

Also, some modern educators heavily criticize the Charlotte Mason method for looking down upon the “fun books” or the “twaddles.”

What is twaddle?

Twaddle is a type of book that that is funny only for the sake of being funny. So, books like “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” are twaddles and Charlotte Mason method urges to get rid of such books!

That’s why some say that the CM method is too strict and uptight!

 

Online Resources for Charlotte Mason Method

• Simply Charlotte Mason – The biggest online resource of the CM method
• Charlotte Mason Homeschooling – A family-owned platform where two homeschooling parents and lifelong educators share different concepts of the CM method
• AmblesideOnline’s Annotated Charlotte Mason Series – The biggest (and free) online guide on the CM method

 

Montessori Method

Educating a gifted child is a tenacious and exhaustive task. As these kids have a hard time keeping up their peers, most of the parents opt for homeschooling.

The Montessori method is immensely effective in such cases. In fact, Dr Maria Montessori, the inventor of the Montessori educational philosophy, developed this method through her psychology works with gifted children.  

It’s a humanistic student-centric approach that follows the below features –

• Free movement
• Long and unstructured study sessions
• Multi-grade classes
• Interest-based learning
• Suggestive and individualized learning

A teacher doesn’t necessarily teach anything particular or have a curriculum. Instead, she surrounds the students with multiple objects and tools. The student often feels natural curiosity towards those pre-positioned objects.

In response to the interest, the teacher teaches various aspects of that certain object or tool.

So, the educational method basically triggers interest in the child and then feeds that interest with information and knowledge.

Maria Montessori suggested decorating the classroom mirroring a comfortable homely environment. So, from that sense, the Montessori method is an ideal homeschooling method.

However, the method demands high maintenance and often becomes very expensive. Also, the formal Montessori method must be conducted by a “Certified Montessori Instructor.”

You can borrow various principles of this method into your custom homeschooling philosophy. But you can’t officially use the Montessori tag.

Also, the method is mostly suited for younger children, below ten- to twelve-year-olds. Moreover, students fall behind in the STEM studies.

 

Online Resources for Montessori Method

• The Montessori Method, by Maria Montessori – The official scientific pedagogy written by Dr Maria Montessori
• The Absorbent Mind by Maria Montessori – Another noteworthy book by the Italian mastermind
• Dr Montessori’s Own Handbook – The original guidelines and notes offered by Dr Maria Montessori
• American Montessori Society – The biggest online resource that empowers and serves the global community of the educators specialized in Montessori Method
• International Montessori Index – An encyclopedic approach to create a database of all resources related to the Montessori Method
• Living Montessori Now – A blog by Deb Chitwood (a Montessori certified instructor) who shares various aspects of this educational method

 

Unschooling Method

The homeschooling pioneer John Holt preached the free-form learning and learn-as-you-go models all his life. The Unschooling method is based on the philosophies of John Holt.

In the Unschooling method, the parents assume the role of the facilitators who drive the children to explore their academic passions.

For example, if a child grows fondness for medieval weapons or African folklore, the parents will facilitate them to learn those topics. Students can learn about anything that interests them.

However, Unschooling method urges the parents to follow some systematic methods to teach fundamentals like reading, writing, mathematics, and logical analysis. The method suggests incorporating technological devices to teach the fundamentals and avoid any form of evaluation or test.

As a result, the students have an optimistic view of education. Unschooling aims to eradicate the stress that the conventional system imposes on the children.

However, the lack of structure might seem too chaotic for many parents. Also, the students might suffer because of the knowledge gaps created by this method.

Despite these facts, Unschooling method is the most modern form of homeschooling and it’s becoming more and more popular.  

 

Online Resources for Unschooling

• Unschool Rules – A blog by the Conciliotto family that shares various ideas about Unschooling (My personal favorite)
• John Holt GWS – Follows the ideologies and principles of John Holt
• Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book Of Homeschooling, by John Holt and Pat Farenga – Often considered as the bible of Unschooling
• Thomas Jefferson Education – Focused on the Leadership Education system but works great for Unschooling too

 

School-at-Home Method

The principles of School-at-Home method is quite simple – students attend school in their homes!

Even some School-at-Home structures include a dedicated classroom in the home with desks, whiteboards, workbooks, assignments, and grading system. So, except the actual school campus and classmates, there’s no difference between School-at-Home and a traditional school.

This method was popular among the European royal and aristocrat families in the 19^th and 20^th century. That’s why some people refer to this method as the traditional homeschooling method. Find more here.

Currently, several private organizations offer online-based School-at-Home educational services. Students get specialist teachers/instructors in different subjects, attend online classes, and finally participate in the online exam.

Modern School-at-Home practices have many similarities with the Personalized Learning method.

However, many criticize the method of being expensive and quite boring.

How so?

To fully implement modern School-at-Home practices, you’ll need a personal computer (desktop or laptop), a webcam, and high-speed internet connection. Also, in many cases, you might have to subscribe to any particular online educational services which are also quite expensive.

Then comes the issue of boredom.

Parents often opt for homeschooling because they don’t want their children to see education as a “boring chore.” When it comes to exploring knowledge, School-at-Home is the polar opposite of the Unschooling method.

 

Online Resources for School-at-Home

• K12 – The modern variant of School-at-Home with a plethora of resources
• School of Tomorrow (A.C.E) – A Christian-centric K-12 homeschooling program
• Abeka Academy – Another Christian-centric cyber school
• Time 4 Learning – One of the richest School-at-Home programs
• Alpha Omega Publications (AOP) – Award-winning Christian homeschool program

 

Unit Studies Philosophy

Unit studies is not necessarily a homeschooling philosophy but a learning strategy.

In this strategy, a student studies a topic through all relevant subject areas.

For example, if a student wants to study Egypt, she could –

• Go through the chronological history of Egypt.
• Discover different stories of Egyptian Gods and Egyptian mythology.
• Play video games based on Egyptian mythology and history, such as Assassin’s Creed Origins, Titan Quest, Age of Mythology, and Egypt III.
• Study and do a geographical analysis of Egypt.
• Go through the theories of human origin from anthropologic perspective.
• Study pyramids, triangles, and other geometric theorems by Egyptian philosophers.

And so on.

When we take this collective approach, we can relate and connect different concepts. As a result, the base of knowledge becomes stronger.  

As Unit Study is a learning strategy, students can use this concept in other educational methods or philosophies. For example, one can easily combine Unit Study with Unschooling or Charlotte Mason.

However, this philosophy is incomplete!

It can’t support the educational needs of a student alone. You need to use other methods along with Unit Studies.

 

Online Resources for Unit Studies

• Unit Studies Made Easy – A guide to incorporate Unit Studies at home
• UnitStudy.com – A dedicated website for exploring Unit Studies
• DIY Homeschooler – One of the richest resources on Unit Studies and self-guided education
• Homeschool Helper Online – Has a wide collection of lap books, worksheets, notebooking pages for Unit Studies
• LaCelle Family Ministries – A massive archive of free resources on Unit Studies that authors collected for 12 years

 

Eclectic Education/ Relaxed Learning

Currently, Eclectic Education is the most popular form of homeschooling. And, there’re plenty of good reasons for this.

Till now, I’ve discussed a number of educational philosophies for homeschooling. Every single one of those philosophies has some good and bad sides.

You might love the freedom that unschooling offers but don’t agree with the complete absence of structure. Similarly, you might want to practice Charlotte but with a hint of Unit Studies.

It’s quite difficult to choose one philosophy over the others.

Isn’t it?

Now, Eclectic Education asks you to choose different homeschooling educational philosophies in different situations, depending on your needs.

For example, you can go for the strict pattern of School-at-Home method for teaching trigonometry or calculus. Now, mastering trigonometry or calculus could be quite stressful.

To blow off the steam, students might take a “nature walk” and relax a bit (Charlotte Mason). Then, the students could also watch some documentaries on “How Egyptians Came up with Trigonometry?” It would motivate them to continue their long journey of mastering trigonometry. This action aligns with the principles with the Unit Studies.  

Do you get the idea?

It’s quite simple!

You’re just combining different philosophies to get the best outcome.

This is the core principle of Eclectic Education or Relaxed Learning.

 

Online Resources for Eclectic Education

• Eclectic Homeschool – A Canada-based homeschooling family that shares all their knowledge in this website, very resourceful
• Teach Beside Me – A blog by a teacher who shares creative and unique teaching ideas
• Eclectic Homeschooling by The Homeschool Mom – One of the most popular names in the homeschooling community
• Think Outside the Classroom: A Practical Approach to Relaxed Homeschooling, by Kelly Crawford
• The Relaxed Art of Eclectic Homeschooling, by Amber Oliver

 

Are You Looking for Legal Help Regarding Homeschooling?

While parents are planning to make a shift to homeschooling, nervousness and fear often cripple them!

“What if the government doesn’t officially recognize my as truly educated?”

It’s quite common.

Sadly, homeschooling is not legal in every corner of the world!

For example, homeschooling is legal under regulating conditions in the USA and Canada. But Greenland views homeschooling as illegal and public education is mandatory.

Also, different states view homeschooling differently in the USA. While California and Texas heavily favor homeschooling, rules for homeschooling are quite stiff in New York.

In Europe, homeschooling is illegal in Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, Turkey, Hungary, Greece, Cyprus, Azerbaijan and many other developing countries! Check the complete list of countries where homeschooling is illegal.

As you see, NOT all governments are fond of homeschooling. Also, students often need to follow some guidelines in every country.

Now, the question is – what do to if you face legal challenges?

These organizations will help you out –

 

Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA)

Website: hslda.org/

HSLDA is the largest legal organization that offers legal support to the homeschoolers. It’s a non-profit organization started by a group of lawyers in 1983.

Despite being a USA-based organization, they represent the homeschoolers globally. If you’re a non-US citizen, you can check their international support section. 

 

Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE)

Website: responsiblehomeschooling.org/

This is another non-profit organization founded by homeschool graduates. It’s a publicly-funded organization that participates in research, education, and advocacy of homeschooling.

 

 

Exploring Different Homeschooling Curriculums

Without the strings, you can’t play the guitar!

Similarly, without a proper curriculum, you can’t educate your child at home. No matter which educational method you choose, you need to have a concrete curriculum.

For example, you know that Unschooling encourages the students to pursue the topics that make them interested. But they still need some guidance.

Think about it.

How can you choose the right path if you don’t know about how many paths are there and where do they lead to?

It’s as simple as that!

First, I’d talk about some of the generalized homeschooling curriculums. Then, I’d walk you through the educational philosophy-based curriculums.

 

5 Best General Homeschooling Curriculums

1. Oak Meadow Program – The Overall Best

Oak Meadow is a private educational institution that has its own accredited K-12 and Distance Learning curriculum. The curriculum is very rich and modern. However, the curriculum is quite expensive.

 

2. Calvert Homeschool – Award-winning Homeschool Support System

Calvert Homeschool boasts of multiple award-winning homeschooling products with time-tested curriculums.

 

3. Ogburn School – Recognized by Reputed International Organizations

Ogburn is an online education provider that has more than 18 years of experience and accredited by five different national and international institutes.

 

4. Global Village School – Budget-Friendly

Offers personalized and holistic educational approach and detailed step-by-step curriculums for each grade.

 

5. Moving Beyond the Page – Most Advanced

Moving Beyond the Page offers a concept-based curriculum that matches the state and national educational standards. After judging the strength and weaknesses of the students, they tweak the curriculum to offer the highest level of efficiency.

 

*BONUS* Printables and Resources by DonnaYoung.org – The MUST-HAVE Tool for Homeschooling!

For better implementation, you need to keep track of the progress of your homeschooling child. DonnaYoung.org is a great place for getting all the printables and similar resources that you’d need.

By the way, it’s NOT a homeschooling curriculum.

 

 

Curriculums for Traditional Homeschooling Methods

 

Curriculums and Teaching Materials for Classical Approach

• Classical Conversations
• The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had
• A Great Book Study
• How to Read a Book (Adler and Van Doren)
• Institute for Excellence in Writing

 

Curriculums and Teaching Materials for Charlotte Mason Method

• Simply Charlotte Mason Curriculum
• Simply Charlotte Mason Bookstore
• The AmblesideOnline Curriculum
• Charlotte Mason Homeschooling Curriculum Bundles
• Charlotte Mason in Community

 

Curriculums and Teaching Materials for Montessori Method

• AMS family Support Materials
• Age of Montessori Curriculum Charts
• Age of Montessori Webinar Video Library
• The Montessori Series (An online library of all 19 books published by Dr Maria Montessori)
• Montessori Videos by EdVid (an online video library containing more than 600 videos on Montessori method)
• Tackle Box Montessori

 

Curriculums and Teaching Materials for Unschooling

• A Comprehensive List of Unschooling Blogs
• Weed’em & Reap Unschooling Resources
• Curated List of Fun Books

 

Curriculums and Teaching Materials for School-at-Home

• A Day in the Life by K12
• PreK-12 Homeschool Curriculum by Time4Learning
• Calvert School Curriculum (Lower School, Age 5-10) (Middle School, Age 11-14)
• Sonlight Curriculum
• Rod & Staff Bible-Based Curriculum
• Houghton Mifflin Homeschool K-12 program Component

 

 

Curriculums and Teaching Materials for Unit Studies  

• Unit Studies Archive by DIY Homeschooler
• Unit Studies Lesson Plans by Homeschool Share
• Homeschool Unit Study Planner by Donna Young (ESSENTIAL!)
• KONOS Unit Studies Curriculum

 

Curriculums and Teaching Materials for Eclectic Education

• Curriculum Choices and Book Lists for Eclectic Education by Eclectic Homeschooling

 

Online Resources for Homeschooling 

The online world is full of helpful educational resources. The number of homeschooling children is on the rise because of these online resources.

In the last century, we were very dependent on educational institutes because a common person couldn’t have easy access to educational resources.

Think about it. how could you learn about calculus in a world without the internet?

Take help from a math professor and visit your nearest public library.

But now you can just browse web-resources like Khan Academy and learn all the concepts of calculus step-by-step. The windows of knowledge are completely open now.

That being said, let’s take a look at some of the most useful online resources for both homeschooling and traditional schooling –

 

Khan Academy – Math and STEM Studies

Website: www.khanacademy.org/

Salman Khan, the founder of the Khan Academy is a modern-day superhero!

Salman was the popular cousin in his family with degrees from MIT and Harvard. But his cousin Nadia struggled with simple math problems like “Unit-Conversion.” Salman, being the responsible cousin started tutoring her using Yahoo Doodle and simple phone calls.

His hard-work bore fruits – Nadia aced the math exams!

Soon, all his cousins wanted special tutoring. But Salman had a tough schedule. So, he started recording tutorial videos and posted on YouTube.

Then, it happened!

Salman soon became a global math teacher. He started posting math videos on every possible concept, tirelessly. After three years he even quit his high-paying hedge fund job started making videos full-time.

The large grants from Google ($2 million) and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ($1.5 million) allowed Salman to build the biggest online platform for education.

Do you know what the best part is?

Khan Academy is completely free and doesn’t even need an account to watch videos. This non-profit organization is working relentlessly to offer free and world-class education to every child anywhere in the world!

 

TED-ED – General

Website: ed.ted.com/

Homeschooling is all about feeding the interest of the students so that they can seek knowledge on the topics that interest them.

There’s no other website that can quench the thirst of a knowledge-seeker better than TED-ED. There are more than 2,000 videos on every possible subject.

Not only the students but also the teachers and parents should follow this website

 

Exploratorium – STEM Studies

Website: www.exploratorium.edu/

Exploratorium is another world-renowned website that thrives to create an incredible curiosity-based learning experience. Exploratorium encourages students to ask questions and offer tools and guidelines to conduct experiments to check the results themselves.

We all know that practical experiments help the students to understand a phenomenon better. This project was the brainchild of the world-renowned physicist Dr Frank Oppenheimer.

Currently, Exploratorium has more than 35,000 pages online filled with science project ideas, experiment guides, film screenings, and many more.

Also, it’s free!

 

NASA STEM Engagement – STEM, Aeronautics, and Space Exploration

Website: www.nasa.gov/stem

Who doesn’t know about NASA?

NASA STEM Engagement is a special online portal for K-12 students to provoke interest in STEM studies, and of course, in aeronautics and space studies.

NASA shares a plethora of educational contents for the young brains. They even occasionally organize events to motivate the students.

For example, NASA has created a contest for the kids where the winners can see the Artemis (lunar craft) flight test, virtual tours to the moon, and explore Kennedy Space Center and Johnson Space Center.

Isn’t that exciting?

 

Project Gutenberg – Online Library

Website: www.gutenberg.org/

We almost always suggest all to read more books. Reading is the best form of education.

But have we ever considered how many children can’t afford books?

A study from the U.S. Department of Education suggests that 61% of low-income families can’t afford books and don’t have a single book in their home!

Yes, more than half of the struggling families can’t buy books for their children in the world!

In such dire situations, Project Gutenberg is nothing short of an angel!

This online library has more than 60,000 free eBooks. Feel free to browse this vast online library to find a book.

 

Coursera – Online Courses

Website: www.coursera.org/

Coursera is a great website for advanced learners. Yes, indeed, K-12 students can’t get many benefits from this website as these courses are too advanced.

Now, students can skill up easily and explore new possibilities. For example, students are taking courses on machine learning, deep learning, AI and creating advanced AI all on their own.

Coursera is showing the world that anyone from anywhere can skill up without the help of a traditional educational institute.

 

Reading Eggs – Reading Skills

Website: readingeggs.com/

One of the most important linguistic skills for K-12 student is the reading skill. Also, it takes years to completely master the art of reading.

Reading Eggs is an award-winning platform for helping children with reading skills. Over 2,000 schools use this platform to educate 2 million students worldwide.

This program mainly relies on different games and fun activities to educate the children.

 

Duolingo – Language Learning

Website: www.duolingo.com/

Duolingo is the world’s most well-known platform to learn any foreign language. Over 300 million users have used Duolingo to learn a new language.

The program won the Forbes’ Best Startup Employers award, TIME Magazine’s Genius Companies award, Fast Company’s Most Innovative Company awards, and many more.

Duolingo is so popular that thousands of universities accept Duolingo English Test as a standard!

So, what language are planning to learn today?

 

SpellQuiz – English Spelling

Website: SpellQuiz.com

K-12 students struggle a lot with spelling skills. Without decent spelling skill, none can master the writing skill. These two are interlinked.

With SpellQuiz, students can test their current vocabulary level, participate in spelling practice sessions, and learn the spelling of the essential words.

The teachers can have access to a rich dashboard where they can monitor the performance of each student individually. They can even check which of the words students misspelled and mastered.

SpellQuiz is the most advanced online program for learning English spelling.

Apart from that students can participate in Spelling Bee Online (SBO) and partake in other word games and fun quizzes.

 

20 Blogs to Follow for Homeschool Enthusiasts

Homeschooling becomes the most efficient form of education if can manage to keep updated on the latest homeschooling trends and practices. There are a number of homeschooling blogs that can help stay updated.

Here’s a complete list of the best homeschooling blogs –

 

1. Simple Homeschool (https://simplehomeschool.net/)
2. The Homeschool Mom (https://www.thehomeschoolmom.com/category/blog/)
3. Confessions of a Homeschooler (https://www.confessionsofahomeschooler.com/)
4. I Can Teach My Child (https://www.icanteachmychild.com/blog/)
5. Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers (https://www.weirdunsocializedhomeschoolers.com/)
6. Homegrown Learners (https://www.homegrownlearners.com/)
7. This Reading Mama (https://thisreadingmama.com/)
8. Hip Homeschool Moms (https://hiphomeschoolmoms.com/)
9. From ABCs to ACTs (https://fromabcstoacts.com/)
10. Meaningful Explorations (https://meaningfulexplorations.com/)
11. Hess Un-Academy (https://hessunacademy.com/)
12. This Bit of Life (https://thisbitoflife.com/)
13. Hide the Chocolate (https://www.hidethechocolate.com/)
14. Orison Orchards (https://orisonorchards.com/)
15. iHomeschool Network (https://ihomeschoolnetwork.com/blog/)
16. Julie Naturally (https://julienaturally.com/)
17. Building Heroes Academy (http://www.buildingheroesacademy.com/)
18. Homeschoolers Life (https://homeschoolerslife.com/)
19. 123 Homeschool 4 Me (https://www.123homeschool4me.com/)
20. Homeschool Creations (https://www.homeschoolcreations.net/)

 

10 Best YouTube Channels for Homeschooling

YouTube is not just a video sharing platform for entertainment. There’re hundreds and thousands of educational videos there and you can follow several great Homeschooling YouTube channels introduce fun in schooling!

Here’re some of my favorite ones –

1. Mark Rober – (https://www.youtube.com/user/onemeeeliondollars)
2. Hoffman Academy – (https://www.youtube.com/user/PianoLessonsForKids)
3. The Royal Institution – (https://www.youtube.com/user/TheRoyalInstitution)
4. Minute Physics (https://www.youtube.com/user/minutephysics/)
5. Brave Wilderness (https://www.youtube.com/user/BreakingTrail)
6. Vihart (https://www.youtube.com/user/Vihart/)
7. Periodic Videos (https://www.youtube.com/user/periodicvideos/)
8. Crash Course (https://www.youtube.com/user/crashcourse)
9. Real Life Lore (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP5tjEmvPItGyLhmjdwP7Ww)
10. Wow Art (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdZutxI1UnH9N3Fh_TeQ4Kw)