That’s a wrap!

The Global Edition of Word Mania, the world’s biggest literacy competition, is now complete. This latest competition was our Global Edition round that challenged 1,547 schools around the globe to improve their literacy outcomes by participating in the Word Mania fun.

Word Mania is run by LiteracyPlanet for students in Grades 1 through 9. It is based on a digital word building exercise that challenges students to think outside the box and create as many words as they can from 15 randomly generated letter tiles, all within a three-minute timeframe.

This year, participating students numbered 1,434,634 and they spelled over 62 million words across 2.1 million Word Mania games in just three weeks. Students who speak English, yet come from 65 countries (The United States, India, Indonesia, Serbia, United Arab Emirates, Nigeria, Malaysia, and the United Kingdom, just to name a few) challenged their international peers.

Word Mania is always great fun for the students!  But, it’s also an activity that helps develop important literacy skills including phonics, word families, rhyming and root words, affixes, spelling, vocabulary, word recognition and word knowledge. Historically, Word Mania has been shown to dramatically improve English literacy scores. For example, from past competitions, we’ve seen the average game score increased by 35% and the average number of correct words per game increase by about  27% after just three weeks of competition play.

LiteracyPlanet wants to thank all the students and schools for their participation this year.  Congratulations to the schools that placed first for their grade level:

Grade 1 – SJK(T) Ladang Tupah, Malaysia

Grade 2 – Uum International School, Changlun, Kedah

Grade 3 – Mayoor Private School Llc, Abu Dhabi, UAE

Grade 4 – St. Ronan’s Primary School, Northern Ireland

Grade 5 – Uum International School,  Changlun, Kedah

Grade 6 – St Michael’s East Wickham Ce Va Primary, England

Grade 7 – Uum International School, Changlun, Kedah Grade 8 – British International School Belgrade, Serbia

Grade 9 – Mayoor Private School Llc, Abu Dhabi, UAE

And a special mention to Uum International School,  Changlun, Kedah for taking out top honors in three out of the nine different grade levels.  Those are incredible results! Adam McArthur, CEO and Managing Director for LiteracyPlanet, said, “We are honored to have the Word Mania experience shared with so many students around the world.  We are now seeing significant improvements in scores for students through the competition, but we’re also seeing a growing diversity of students exposed to and enjoying the Engish literacy learning opportunities that come from their Word Mania experience.”

Keen to find out more? Are you a Teacher, Principal, or Administrator who is interested in signing your school up to LiteracyPlanet’s literacy program? You can do so here.