General Preparations |
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Separate the Chance Cards from the All-Star Cards. |
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Shuffle the Chance Cards and put them back into the case. Keep the All-Star Cards in a separate stack. |
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Select a pack of Clue Cards. These are coded with green, blue or red bars at the top of the card. Shuffle the cards and place them back in the card case.
You can mix the different colour-coded cards together if you want to.
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Level One Playing Instructions
Level Two Playing Instructions
Level Three Playing Instructions
Note 1 - Rules for Writing on the Game Board - Level 3 only
Note 2 - Rules for Scoring - Level 3 only
Note 3 - Chance Squares
Additional Note - Speed eXtraDICTION®
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Level One Playing Instructions
Level One is intended for players who are just starting to learn to recognise and write the letters of the alphabet. |
Adult help necessary. Recommended for 1 or 2 players (not counting the adult helper). |
Take a Clue Card from the top of the pack. |
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Show the card to the players.
At this level of the game, there is no need to conceal any part of the card from the player. |
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Point to the illustration and tell the players what it is. Ask the players to repeat what you have just said. |
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Spell out the letters of the word and ask the players to repeat them after you.
Note: It does not matter if they do not yet know the letters of the alphabet. The objective of this part of the exercise is to familiarise them with both the written and spoken forms of letters and words. They will learn and remember through repetition in the form of play. |
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Help the first player copy the word onto the board. Read aloud each letter as it is being written. Get all the players to repeat them after you. |
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The word should be written horizontally anywhere on the board. Each letter must occupy one square. |
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Help the player count the number of stars in the squares occupied by the letters. Give the player the appropriate number of stars using the All-Star cards.
To help players learn to recognise numbers, encourage them to pick the appropriate All-Star card from the pack themselves. |
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For each letter that occupies a Chance square (the square with the exclamation (!) mark), let the player pick a card from the stack of Chance Cards. |
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If the Chance Card has stars, the player keeps it. If the Chance Card has rats, the player must return the same number of stars as there are rats. The card with the rats is then out of play and is put to one side and not used again for the rest of that game. |
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Before putting the Clue Card just used to one side, show it to the players and get them to say the word and its spelling aloud. |
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Take a new Clue Card from the top of the pack and repeat the process with the next player, if any. Otherwise, repeat the process with the same player. |
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The game ends when 10 Clue Cards have been used. Of course, you can also continue playing until there are no more empty squares to write on.
The player with the most number of stars wins. |
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Level Two Playing Instructions
Level Two is for players who can already write and recall the spelling of certain words. |
Adult helper necessary. Recommended for 1 or 2 players (not counting the adult helper). |
Take a Clue Card from the top of the pack, turn it over and put it back into the case to conceal the word at the bottom of the card. |
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With the card still in the case, show it to the first player. |
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From the illustration, ask the player to guess what the word is. The first letter of the word and the number of letters are additional clues that can be seen just below the illustration. At the same time read out the meaning of the word that is printed on the card.
Note: It does not matter if the players do not entirely understand the meaning of the phrase or sentence. The objective of this part of the exercise it to familiarise them with the sounds and rhythm of words in sentences. Through repetition they will begin to remember and understand the meaning of the words. |
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If the player guesses the word correctly, ask her to spell the word and then show her the word as printed at the bottom of the card.
If the player guesses the word incorrectly, then start the process again with a new Clue Card. The Clue Card just used is put to one side.
If there is a second player, it is his turn to guess the word on the new Clue Card. |
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If the player guesses the word correctly, help the player write the word onto the board. Read each letter out loud as it is being written. Get the players to repeat them after you. |
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As in Level 1, the word should be written horizontally anywhere on the board. Each letter must occupy one square. |
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As in Level 1,
help the player count the number of stars in the squares occupied by the letters. Give the player the appropriate number of stars using the All-Star cards.
To help players learn to recognise numbers, encourage them to pick the appropriate All-Star card from the pack themselves. |
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As in Level 1, for each letter that occupies a Chance square (the square with the exclamation (!) mark), let the player pick a card from the stack of Chance Cards. |
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As in Level 1, if the Chance Card has stars, the player keeps it. If the Chance Card has rats, the player must return the same number of stars as there are rats. The card with the rats is then out of play and is put to one side and not used again for the rest of that game. |
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As in Level 1, before putting the Clue Card just used to one side, show it to the players and get them to say the word and its spelling aloud. |
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Take a new Clue Card from the top of the pack and repeat the process with the next player, if any. Otherwise, repeat the process with the same player. |
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The game ends when 10 Clue Cards have been used. Of course, you can also continue playing until there are no more empty squares to write on.
The player with the most number of stars wins. |
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Level Three Playing Instructions
Level Three is for players who can already read and write reasonably well. |
Adult help may not be required if players can already read, write and count. Recommended for 2 players (not counting the adult helper). |
Player 1 takes a Clue Card from the top of the pack, turns it over and puts it back into the case to conceal the word at the bottom of the card. |
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Player 1 says how many letters are in the word and what letter the word begins with and then reads out the meaning of the word as printed on the card. |
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Player 1 asks the other player to guess what the word is. |
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If the player guesses the word incorrectly, then Player 2 start the process from the beginning with a new Clue Card. The Clue Card just used is put to one side. |
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If the player guesses the word correctly, she writes the word onto the board. |
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The words can be written horizontally and vertically on the board. (See Note 1 for further instructions) |
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For scoring (award of stars), see Note 2. |
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As in Levels 1and 2, for each letter that occupies a Chance square (the square with the exclamation (!) mark), let the player pick a card from the stack of Chance Cards. |
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As in Levels 1 and 2, if the Chance Card has stars, the player keeps it. If the Chance Card has rats, the player must return the same number of stars as there are rats. The card with the rats is then out of play and is put to one side and not used again for the rest of that game. |
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Put the Clue Card just used to one side. |
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Take a new Clue Card from the top of the pack and repeat the process with the next player, if any. Otherwise, repeat the process with the same player. |
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The game ends when 10 Clue Cards have been used. Of course, you can also continue playing until there are no more empty squares to write on.
The player with the most number of stars wins. |
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Note 1
Rules for writing on the game board - Level 3 only |
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Words may be written horizontally from left to right or vertically from top to bottom. |
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The first word written on the board must make use of the central square. |
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Subsequent words written may:
cross existing words where they share the same letter; |
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touch existing words such that the existing word (or part of the existing word ) forms a new word that can be found in a dictionary; |
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or float, that is, neither cross or touch existing words. |
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Note 2
Method of Scoring for Level 3 |
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The game board is divided into zones. The zone boundaries are marked with bold lines.
Zone 1 consists of only one square which is the central square of the board.
Zone 2 surrounds Zone 1.
Zone 3 surrounds Zone 2.
There are four Corner Zones, each with 4 squares. |
In the example above, the first word written on the board is "apple".
To score first add up the total number of stars in the squares occupied by the word. In this case it is 1 + 2 + 1 = 4.
Then work out how many zones the word occupies. In this example, it is 3 zones.
Therefore the total number of stars to be awarded is 4 x 3 = 12. |
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Let's say the next word written is "star" and it touches the word "apple" and thus turns "apple" into "apples".
The score for the word "star" is 5 x 2 = 10.
In addition, the score for the new word "apples" is
4 x 3 = 12.
The player for that turn gets 22 stars. |
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For a floating word, the number of stars for the word is NOT multiplied by the number of zones it occupies.
In the above example, the word "rat" is floating. Although it occupies 2 zones, the score is only 3 stars. |
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Note 3
Chance Squares |
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Chance Squares are squares with an exclamation mark ( ! ). Except when a word is a floating word, for each letter that occupies a Chance Square, the player must take a Chance Card.
The number of Chance Cards the player gets is not multiplied by the number of zones the word occupies.
The player does not get Chance Cards for Chance Squares occupied by the existing word she modifies. |
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Additional Note
Speed eXtraDICTION® |
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This variant of the game is for players who already have a fairly good vocabulary.
In this game, players do not use the Clue Cards. They just take turns to write their own words on the game board. The same word cannot be used more than once in a game.
The rules of writing and scoring for Level 3 apply.
This method of playing can also be used to end a Level 3 game when the board starts to get crowded. |
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