Caboolture wordsmiths take Word Mania crown

A group of Year 4 students from Australian Christian College at Caboolture were crowned Australia-New Zealand year level champions in what’s been dubbed the world’s biggest literacy competition.

Word Mania is a literacy competition that helps develop literacy skills including phonics, word families, rhyming and root words, affixes, spelling, vocabulary, word recognition and word knowledge.

Word Mania 2022, LiteracyPlanet’s interactive digital word-building game was the biggest yet for participation, activity, and scores.

Students from 2607 schools in 68 countries challenged themselves to improve their literacy and built an astounding 103 million words

Australian and New Zealand students in years 1-9 raced against the clock to help their school climb the leaderboard, dragging and rearranging letter tiles in three minutes to build as many words as they could from a set of 15 randomly generated letters.

LiteracyPlanet CEO Tom Richardson says organisers were blown away by the skill of competitors around the world.

“Word Mania is first of all about having fun, but it is also about supporting teachers in driving interest, passion and understanding of words and language from their students,” Tom says.

We’re so proud of Word Mania as an initiative that combines interactive gaming, a competitive environment and teamwork to engage students in their classrooms to improve literacy.”

Students inspired

Australian Christian College Moreton Year 4 teacher Liana Hnailum says his class loves playing Word Mania and he was proud of what students including Castiel Sauuila-Faapito, Adam Bruce and Milandev Benny achieved.

“They love it, it’s so much fun - I use it as a reward for them,” he says.

“It’s actually really good at showing them new words.

“These boys are really good - I can’t even get a third of what he (Minandev) gets.

“We didn’t expect to win, we are proud of them because they work really hard.

“The main thing is that they get to have fun and learn at the same time.”

Milandev Benny achieved the highest score of the class at 38,000 and says he likes figuring out new words.

“I’ve been playing it for two years and taught everyone else how to play,” he says.

Castiel Sauuila-Faapito and Adam Bruce say the game is fun,

“I play Wordmania all the time,” Castiel says.

“I play it out of school, in school and at home,” Adam says.

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