MyVocabulary.com is a website that is filled with a plethora of vocabulary puzzles. In fact, in a sea of vocabulary websites, this one stands out head and shoulders above the crowd. Best of all, the content of nearly the entire website is free – that’s over 2,500 pages of educational puzzles! What I reviewed, the Open Educational Resource Premium Membership, costs $15 per year and allows for several extremely useful advantages over the free website. Specifically, you can manage students as in a classroom (create individual logins, assignments, etc.), students can email you their completed puzzle assignments, you can manage your puzzles in one convenient location, you can manage all your files and folders in the cloud by linking your Dropbox or Google accounts, and you can make MyVocabulary.com thematically your own with your own colors and branding.

These are the things that you get with your $15 yearly membership, but all the other resources provided on the website are free to anyone (with the exception of two Root-Word Lessons). Like me, you may be asking why anyone would give away the store for free. Founder Jan Cook has an answer. She writes that she and her husband were privileged to have great educations, as were their three sons, and they want to advantage others similarly by doing what they can (point of information here: Jan’s husband, Carey, is the grandson of Pulitzer Prize winning political cartoonist Carey Orr of the Chicago Tribune! I know his work! I was so tickled when I read this on their website; I always feel such a kinship with fellow word nerds.).

So what is provided on the website? There are five different categories of word lists: Root-Word Lesson, Subject Puzzles, Subject Word Lists, Test Prep, and Novels. When you select a category, you are given the selection of word lists available under that category. For example, under Subject Puzzles, you have English Language Arts, English Literature, General Interest, and six others (along with options to view all). Selecting one of these categories yields word lists, along with a total number of words on the lists, available puzzles, additional relevant word lists in other categories (cross-referencing, if you will), and even lesson plan ideas in places!

Finally, though, down to the nitty-gritty! What kinds of puzzles are we talking about? First of all, the puzzles are interactive: your student (or you!) enters the answers directly online and then submits the answers (and if you have the premium membership, emails them to you – I love this feature!). Here are the puzzle categories (not all puzzle types are available for all word lists/categories): complete the word, fill-in-the-blank, definition match, synonyms and antonyms, true/false, crossword, word search, concentration, word find, and reading passage. As you can see, there is a really nice variety!

If you’re wondering how you would use this website in your every day school life, there are several possible ways. You could use the Latin and Greek roots to study a root a day or a root a week (or, rather, a list a day/week). You could use the novel vocabulary lists to check and see if there are vocabulary puzzles for anything you are reading in English. You could check the subject matter lists for relevant vocabulary (the geography vocabulary is just wonderful). From a homeschooler’s perspective, the Shakespeare, character education, and mythology lists have applications everywhere! Once you get started looking around, you can’t stop thinking of word lists that you want to assign to your students – and *that’s* when that $15 premium membership comes in very, very handy!

My only complaint about the website is that the premium membership dashboard is a little cumbersome, but that’s a small issue when compared with everything it has to offer. In fact, the site is so good that I would gladly make a $15 freewill offering for everything that Mr. and Mrs. Cook are offering students for free. My children have really loved the vocabulary puzzles, and I am looking forward to starting my rising freshman on SAT prep puzzles next in anticipation of the PSAT. This is one website that will remain starred on my favorites toolbar for years to come.

-Product review by Laura Delgado, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, April, 2017