Melville Senior High School year 7s have won an Australia and New Zealand wide word-building competition called Word Mania. More than 400,000 students from 3,000 schools in two countries competed, playing 5.3 million Word Mania games and building more than 126 million words.
Winners were presented with their prizes at the assembly on the 1st of November by Nadine Putterill, WA Manager of Literacy Development . This is the second year running that the school has won in this age group. A trophy was presented to champion word builder from the team Alexander Wong.
The Year 8s came third in their age group and won a trophy and a cheque for $250 for school resources. Year 7s won two educational technology tools: a Wanhao Duplicator Printer and a Hexapod EZ Robot.
Year 8s also did well and were placed third overall for their year level. Compared to their results last year, their average game score increased by 109%, and their number of correct words per game increased by 46%.
Gifted and Talented English teacher Maddie Jennings encouraged her classes to go the extra mile to try to improve on last year. Melville SHS was one of only five schools to make it into the top three for two different year levels, and the highest achieving of the three schools to make it into a top three from WA.
About the Game
Word Mania is a word building computer game that involves a variety of literacy skills including phonics, word families, rhyming and root words, prefixes and suffixes, spelling, vocabulary, word recognition and word knowledge.
