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 Friendly have 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