WHY WORDSMART?

Fiji School Kids — Delainamasi Government School

The Big Picture.

Wordsmart is more than just a literacy program – it’s a movement that empowers students worldwide to become confident and fluent readers while pursuing their passions to create a positive impact on our world.

EVIDENCE BASED

WordSmart is based on scientific research and personal experience in literacy, mindfulness and positive psychology. The incorporates esessential literacy tasks which include phonological awareness, letter recognition, letter-sound matching, and sight words so children can build a strong foundation for reading.

STORYTELLING

Wordsmart uses the magic of interactive storytelling, the ways our brain naturally learns. Our fun and child-centered tasks are embedded in a fantastical story. Kids feel joy & excitement when joining our characters Tama &Tracey on their adventures. The interactive story motivates them to keep going even if tasks become more challenging.

LEARNING SWEET SPOT

Wordsmart triggers the children’s learning sweet spot. Our tasks stimulate the child’s analytical as well as their creative side. Each phoneme is introduced with a unique and funny short story. Children create a meaningful connection with the learning content. The young learner retains acquired knowledge better and learns faster.

WELLBEING

Wordsmart encourages healthy behaviours in young learners. We have taken learning-to-read one step further. Our digital learning environment supports psychological well-being. We uses strategies to support and strengthen healthy core beliefs so that children experience positive emotions while learning.

In this short video Paul Blackman, the founder of WordSmart, talks about his bold vision for teaching and assessing reading worldwide

Te Pae Tawhiti – Vision

WordSmart will transform education world-wide ensuring that all students regardless of wealth, ability and neurodiversity will achieve exceptional results using reading to foster and follow their passions to a level of excellence that enables them to reach their full potential.

Testimonials

Kiri Marshall (Parent – Five stars app store)

My daughter loves using Wordsmart. The games are easy enough for her to use and understand mostly on her own and she really enjoys working her way through the letter sounds to move on to the next world!
It has definitely helped with her confidence and has been a great tool during lockdown and learning from home. Totally recommend this app.

Julia Robson (Parent)

Thanks for telling us about Paul Blackman and the huge help he gave your Kizzy. We can’t sing his praises enough!! He has helped Julia SO much. She went from a reading age of 6 to between 12.3 and 12.9 in just over a year of weekly sessions with Paul. She is now going to him for maths.
Our big girls are in high school next year….off to an all-girls boarding school (Nga Tawa) down in Marton….so it is fantastic that Julia has been given such awesome help to her starting high school. It has lifted Julia’s confidence hugely and as a result, she is doing so much better socially and even her stuttering has reduced in severity. Julia’s whole attitude to her learning has changed to one of positivity. Actually, she is now much happier with life in general.

Ishelle (Shelly) Stevenson (Coroglen School)

The kids like it, like the feeling they get from it, a sense of achievement. Finds Wordsmart helpful as an ongoing class tool. Gives the kids confidence to learn.

Renee Dekker (Parent)

To whom it concerns,

After a long struggle through the standard routes of referrals and assessments, while trying to get answers for the reasons behind our 10year old daughter’s learning struggles and behavioural issues, we were introduced to Paul and Blair of WordSmart.
We finally discovered through the Lexplore technology and Paul and Blair’s support, that our daughter had dyslexia (or Prolexia as we now call it!).
We were so blessed to have been offered the opportunity to learn through the WordSmart app and weekly lessons with Paul, and are totally overjoyed at the progress Nevaéh has made.

Nevaéh began with WordSmart & Paul 8 months ago (at 9years old), and at that time was reading basic words only (memorised ie. a, me, the, he), she was writing unreadable/unrecognisable stories (due to little to no spelling ability), had a Burt Reading level of 5.6 yrs, and carried a huge amount of frustration and anger around all this- because her comprehension was great and she had all the creative ideas, but no ability to communicate/express them. She lost confidence and desire to write or read at all.

Now she is reading well (recently tested at Burt Reading level 7.1yrs), she enjoys and initiates reading, uses punctuation and is beginning to grow in fluidity. She is decoding many new words with confidence, writing amazing stories that we can read, and she’s even written and illustrated a whole book! She is motivated (currently creating a new book), eager to learn and sets high goals for herself.
It’s without doubt that a large part of Nevaéh’s development & growth this year is due to the WordSmart teaching and learning, and we are so excited to see where it takes her next, and we are very relieved and grateful to have this opportunity.
We could not recommend it highly enough, and fully support the dream of making this programme accessible for all children, every child should have this opportunity!

Alana Kline (Parent)

This is simple and powerful and needs to be shared to the greatest number of children who simply require a little bit more. I can only imagine its power if it is also given to those who struggle in challenged families and schools.

Year One Teachers (Delainamasi Government School)

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