WritingCity!

It's here, VocabularySpellingCity finally has a full sibling, writingcity. An elementary writing program.

Here's the idea. VSC has pioneered a fun low cost easy to use approach to using education. The foundational concept is to implement best practices in a way that takes advantage of technology to simplify the lives of teachers, the management of the schools, and most importantly, the education of the kids.

After years of searching, VSC found WriteStepsWriting which is a great writing program which will form the bones of WritingCity.

What is WriteStepsWriting? It is a writing workshop approach to teaching writing with easy to use daily lessons plans for all of elementary school.  The daily mini lessons can be delivered by the teacher or played with the videos. The WritingCity videos work especially well when teachers are using literacy centers and one center is focused on writing where the students have the daily mini lesson before doing their work.

WritingCity is also popular and effective because of the examplar text. Only really student examples are used and they are presented as is so students are not intimidated by professional examples which don't resemble anything they are ready to produce. The friendly examples of other students' writing which gets lavishly praised and analysed encourages students to go ahead and give it a try!

On another note, VSC also has a half sister site which is Science4Us. It will become a full sibling once it gets rebranded and extended for 3rd-5th.  Much of the interesting science work is discussed on the US Science Education website such as here, studying with bicycles.