Word Wizard

Word Wizard ran from 2014 to 2018 as a successful multilingual spelling competition, open to S1-S3 pupils learning French, Gaelic, German, Mandarin or Spanish.

Word Wizard is no longer run at a national level, however we have made available resources which schools can use to organise their own competition in house, or within their cluster. View the 'Word Wizard resources' tab below to access these and for more information.

Word Wizard was organised by SCILT, Scotland's National Centre for Languages and CISS, the Confucius Institute for Scotland's Schools, with support from the University Council for Modern Languages Scotland and the Universities of Strathclyde, St Andrews, Aberdeen, Dundee and Edinburgh College. Word Wizard is adapted from the Spelling Bee competition, organised by Routes into Languages and devised by Jane Driver of the Voyager Academy.

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The following information packs provide an outline of the rules, and guidelines on how to spell special characters. Please note the rules are different for the Mandarin competition:

Information Pack (French, Gaelic, German, Spanish)
Information Pack (Mandarin)

If you are running your own competition in your school/cluster/local authority you may find the following timeline useful:

November - introduce Stage 1 lists
January - introduce Stage 2 lists
March - introduce Stage 3 lists
May/June - Final competition

You may choose to run semi-finals during the year as well.

If you have any questions about running your own competition please feel free to contact SCILT on scilt@strath.ac.uk.

Powerpoints

You can download the following PowerPoints to help test pupils on the words in a random order.

Open the powerpoint
Along the top of the powerpoint select the ‘View’ tab
Click on the button ‘Slide Sorter’ and you will see smaller images of the slides
From here you can move the slides around into any order you wish

Word lists for each language and level can be downloaded below, and schools can use them in whatever way is useful to them. View the 'practice tools' tab above for ideas and resources to help pupils learn the word lists.

Word lists were released in three stages. For French, Gaelic, German and Spanish there are 75 words in each stage. For Mandarin there are 40 characters in each stage.

French

Beginner
Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3

Intermediate
Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3

Gaelic

Beginner
Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3

Intermediate
Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3

German

Beginner
Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3

Intermediate
Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3

Mandarin

Beginner
Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3

Intermediate
Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3

Spanish

Beginner
Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3

Intermediate
Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3

Photos

View photos from the finals of the following competitions on Flickr:

What is a spelling bee?

Find out what a spelling bee, and why ours in different, in this video featuring finalists from the 2013 Spelling Bee competition.

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Word Wizard Final 2014

Watch competitors spelling in the Word Wizard 2014 final and hear from the pupils about why they enjoy entering the competition.

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What pupils enjoyed about participating in Word Wizard:

I liked learning new words, it gave me a head start in class.

I loved getting the chance to share the hard work I put in with an audience in a competition format.

I enjoyed performing in front of the crowd, but most of all watching and listening to the other languages, which was inspiring.

I enjoyed learning unknown vocabulary in an exciting manner in the modern language.

What teachers enjoyed about participating in Word Wizard:

Vocabulary was selected and tailored to curriculum. Great for the pupils to use after in school.

Practice for the competition has allowed pupils to increase their confidence and has allowed pupils to be competitive with each other in a different way.

Motivating pupils to learn vocabulary, especially boys! Element of competition in class. Raising profile of languages in school.

Gives the chance to broaden the language skills of more pupils.