Review: Mrs Wordsmith | The Narrative Journey

Encouraging children to learn can be at times frustrating, especially if the subject matter doesn’t appeal. This summer, my husband and I have been doing lots of different things to encourage our girls to read. We signed them up to our local library’s summer reading challenge and they’ve actually completed the challenge already. I think the incentive of stickers along the way, and a medal and certificate when they finish have helped, but in fairness, they’ve both done really well.

Now that they’ve completed their reading challenge, they’re eager to learn lots more words.

We were recently sent an exciting new product to review that can help us with this!

Mrs Wordsmith is the world’s most innovative vocabulary programme. They combine data science and creativity to illustrate the 10,000 words that matter for academic success.

Launched in 2016 in London, Mrs Wordsmith is one of the fastest-growing, VC backed startups in the UK. They help young people learn efficiently through engaging content from the Hollywood artists behind Madagascar. Their words are carefully selected and curated by Cambridge University data scientists to ensure that children learn the words they will come across at school and in the books they read.

We were sent their Narrative Journey box. Before I go into more detail about the product itself, it’s important to say that this is a subscription service. You can either sign up for a monthly subscription box either by paying £19.95 per month or you can pay up front and save £40. This is billed as one payment of £199, which is equivalent to £16.58 a month. The other option is to buy the full set box for £125.

The monthly subscription box includes:

• Illustrated Word of the Day workbook with that month’s words
• Word pair cards
• New workbook and cards every month
• Word of the Day workbook stand (in your first month)
• Dictionary for all your Mrs Wordsmith words (in your month six box)

Whereas as the full set box includes:

• Mrs Wordsmith gift storage box
• All the Narrative Journey set in one go, including: Workbooks; Word Pair cards; Word of the Day workbook stand
• A binder to keep your words safe

We were sent a monthly subscription box to review.

Inside the box:

Contents:

Inside the lid of the box you’ll find a welcome letter which explains how to set up.

We set up the workbook stand first and put the workbook on it whilst we looked through the workbook to familiarise ourselves with it.

The workbook is full of different types of words along with their meaning, and for each word there’s a practise page to complete.

Mrs Wordsmith say that children learn better visually, and a word-a-day habit is the best way to build a stong vocabulary. Designed for children aged 6-14, the aim is to provide children with the building blocks of storytelling, and boost their reading and writing age. The more rare words your child knows, the higher their reading and writing age, and the better they’ll do at school.

On the practise page for each word, children are asked to circle the synonyms, and then draw a line to the word pairs. For  younger children, I’d suggest an adult helps. The first page does explain what a synonym is, along with what word pairs are.

After talking about the words with our children, and explaining what they needed to do, they were eager to get started. They both did really well, and enjoyed completing a few pages.

There’s an answer sheet in the back of the workbook if you/your child gets stuck, and once you’re finished you can store the workbook in the handy file that comes with the monthly box.

Also included are word pair cards, pictured below. These can be used to test word pairs that children learn in their daily workbook. They’re colourful and well illustrated to appeal to children.

Whilst I like the idea of this for children to learn new words, increase their vocabulary and learning, I do feel it’s a tad repetitive which can become quite tiresome and boring for children. I do think the starting age guide of 6 is a bit young for this, but I guess it’s good to start young, and the younger they start, the quicker they’lll learn.

Overall, it’s a good idea if your children are engaged enough and willing to learn new words. I do think it’s quite expensive per month for what it is, when you could probably look online for similar free resources, but it does take the hassle out of having to do that yourself.

For the purpose of this review we were sent the above box free of charge. All views and opinions are 100% my own.