McNeill Designs for Brighter Minds
www.McNeillBrighterMinds.com
P.O. Box 5067
Wilmington, DE 19808
866-520-2555
Word Power Challenge is a vocabulary card game for ages 8 and up, consisting of three separate decks of cards, each one a different category of words. Over the Rainbow contains color related words, Speaking Out is “designed to bring clarity, definition, and precision to your speech,” and Lost in Space has spatial words.
Each deck of 64 cards has four sets of 16 different word cards. The object of the game is to collect books of all four matching cards by playing Go Fish. Each attractively designed card has the vocabulary word, a photo image, and four facts relating to the word: the definition including part of speech, the origin, synonyms, and a sentence using the word. However, each of the four cards for each word has a different fact at the top of the card. In collecting matching cards, you have to use the top fact to go fishing for other cards in the set.
My children really got into the game. The competitive factor of trying to get the most books made it fun and interesting. My youngest, a 7 year old, had trouble pronouncing some of the terms, but she was eager to keep up with her older siblings, and it was easy for the grown-up playing (that would be me) to help her out as needed. Each fact is preceded by a different colored bullet and that was helpful in directing her attention to where she needed to focus.
The rules say you cannot use the vocabulary word in fishing for the others; you must use the top fact. For example, you would say, “Do you have the word that means to strike against forcefully and repeatedly?” This certainly gets you to learn those facts, but one could feasibly play the game by just scanning one’s cards for those clues without even connecting the vocabulary word you are supposed to be learning to the facts about that word.
To help overcome that, we decided, upon putting down a book, a player had to read out loud the word, its definition, and use it in an original sentence.
The vocabulary supplement booklet has all 48 vocabulary words with pronunciations, more detailed etymology and definitions, and the date of origin. I would have appreciated having the word pronunciation on the cards themselves.
As is the case with most card games, this would be a good addition to your travel activities collection. I also think it would be easy for creative minds to come up with other games to play with the cards. Memory or concentration is one example.
—Product review by: Kathy Gelzer, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, July, 2008
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