Scottish Friendly Letterfall - Including Winner Update

When you have children in your house, a lot of your time is spent helping with spelling and teaching them to read, from pre school to reception to the more complex secondary school projects. Starting with the smaller, simpler words and gradually moving on to learn the bigger more complex ones can be very rewarding, but do you ever wonder how many words you actually know?

Scottish Friendlyhave come up with an addictive and yet educational competition with the chance to win a prize of £100 per country or a grand prize of £500. Once on their website you simply choose your country and then try and spell as many words as you can from the letters that fall down.

It’s like a fast paced Scrabble crossed with Tetris, I have to admit that I’m not the best at it and my highest score so far is 501, considering the highest for Britain is currently in the high 20000’s I think I have a way to go.

So what is all this about? The Scottish Book Trust have brought together some renowned International and UK authors to schools and libraries across the country and, together with Scottish Friendly, have created the Letterfall UK Championship. The aim being to encourage children’s literacy with a game that children and their parents can play together and test their word skills at the same time.

Today so many people have forgotten how important literacy is, with the introduction of mobile phones and text messages so much of our basic day to day use of the English language is governed by a need for quick messages.

So what are you waiting for, why not pitch your skills against each other and lots of people around the country, head over to the Letterfall website now to take part and add your score to the growing board.

This addictive game is now over, here are some of the statistics and the winner...

Statistics 

Games Played by Territory:

Territory	Games Played	Number of Contestants
England	865	121
Scotland	306	32
Wales	140	17
Northern Ireland	258	11

Most Interesting Words in the Final:

Word	Points
BRAMBLINGS	190
HORSEPLAY	180
HOGSHEAD	128
EXCULPATE	207
SAWHORSES	135
AIRPOWER	104
JIMMIED	119

The Winner, Nichola Leaver, age 20, has been named the country’s leading wordsmith after winning a national online word competition.

Ms Leaver competed in the ‘Letterfall Championship 2014’, run by ISA provider Scottish Friendly. The competition saw hundreds of people from all over the country compete at playing the popular online, Scrabble®-inspired word game, Letterfall.

The competition ran over two months with Ms Leaver, who hails from Wrexham and studies in Chester, winning the regional championship for Wales.  In the UK Final she finished the tournament in top spot having used words such as ‘quivered’, ‘cuticles’ and ‘flounder’ to arrive at an impressive score of 62,414 – more than 13,000 points clear of her nearest rival. 

Ms Leaver commented: “I’ve always loved word games but to be honest, I never thought I was going to win. Letterfall is an easy game to play, but when the pressure is on, especially when you are closing in on the top score, it did get a little nerve-racking.”

NB: This is a sponsored post which has been written in association with Scottish Friendly

City of Friends App Review

My husband is away a lot and before a recent week away we had the discussion of how we could teach our son about the emergency services, should anything happen to mummy or the house whilst my husband wasn't around.

So when we were offered the City of Friends app to review it sounded like the perfect opportunity to introduce my son to the emergency services and what they do.

 

The app has been launched around the kid’s TV show City of Friends which has turned into a global phenomenon and currently broadcasting in over 150 countries worldwide.

Designed for pre-schoolers and their families, the City of Friends app has become the number one app for children in its native Norway and teaches children about the emergency services by interacting with the show’s main characters; Max the police officer, Elphie the fire officer and Ted the paramedic.

There are a selection of games and some videos which are unlocked the more games you complete. This is great as a four year olds attention span can sometimes average only seconds so they can swap and change between games.

My personal favourite was the Put out fires with Elphie game, not only was this fun but as fire is a real killer and also a real possibility I think this certainly teaches them about what happens.

The pairs/memory game is also really good and always goes down well with my son, there is also a helicopter flying game and organize Ted’s first aid kit which are both really fun and also help teach how to match shapes and coordination.

Whilst I'm sure this is intentional due to the number of countries and therefore languages this is played in there are no words or commentary to assist the child in playing the games.  Nowhere does it say what you have to do to get more videos and it would be good if it could talk you through what you need to do and maybe what each implement, character or object is.

The only other thing that did bother us slightly was the addition of a Facebook and Website button, if this is aimed at 2-6 year olds there is really no need for this and our opinion is that it shouldn't take you to an external website from within the game itself.

Other than that though if you are looking for an educational and fun app that teaches children about the emergency services then at £1.49 this is most definitely a winner and we have certainly enjoyed playing it together.

NB: We were given a redemption code in order to review this app however all opinions are my own.