See and Spell

 Is it a toy or an educational tool?

This clever educational device certainly predates Vocab- SpellingCity- .com.  I haven't found a date on it but I'm guessing its post WWII, perhaps the 50s.

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

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

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

The See and Spell is similar to flash cards and a zillion other contemporary solutions to the problem that its hard to test youself on spelling.  Of course, the most contemporary solution (which I personally am troubled by) solution to the studying-your-spelling-list-problem is...to NOT give spelling tests.   Yes, the Common Core standards and associated curriculum have based their approach to word study, as best I can tell, on some research such as one study that I've heard about that shows a very LOW correlation between the ability to spell words on spelling tests and the ability to spell them in the context of writing.  Conclusion: they're dropping weekly spelling tests and weekly list-based word study.  I suspect that will be harder to accomplish than they may think.

One more thing: Thanks to Cady for the See and Spell.