Birds and Words

You're a voluneer creating wildlife reports at a nature reserve. Your reports earn you recognition for a job opening. But nature's beauty cannot disguise the game's competitive heart. To gain the recognition you seek, you'll need to:

• Create descriptive sentences whose word value scores are higher than your peers,
• Find your favorite bird doubling word values containing your bird,
• Be the first to match unique sentence patterns, and
• Vary your report's writing to earn a diversity bonus.

With four ways to earn points and thousands of sentence possibilities, your chances for gaining the recognition you seek are only limited by your imagination and creativity.

Using word cards, create sentences for your wildlife report. Earn recognition points from word values, matching sentence patterns, and finding your favorite bird. Win with the most points or, if playing solo, enough to reach a recognition goal.

Start with a capitalized word. Add words from left to right using intuitive next word symbols to create thousands of sentence combinations. You decide when to complete and score your sentence.

Birdwatch while creating your report. You'll pick a unique bird whose presence doubles word values. If a word has your bird, its value is doubled.

Earn bonus points for matching sentence patterns. Pattern cards show an example sentence, its words, and interesting grammar facts.

Earn bonus points for completing three difficulty levels of sentences. Collect the Food (easy) , Nests (moderate), and Eggs (challenging) symbols found on pattern cards to earn a valuable bonus.

One-player mode allows you to sharpen your skills and learn new approaches to creating different sentences. As your skills grow, so will your achievements.

• Intern: Scores > 140 and completes 7 sentence patterns
• Assistant Steward:  Scores > 150 and completes 8 sentence patterns
• Steward: Score > 160 and completes 8 sentence patterns
• Conservation Manager:  Scores > 160 and completes 9 sentence patterns
• Conservation Director:  Scores > 170 and completes 9 sentence patterns. An incredible feat!

• Be creative! You have more than 140 words and thousands of sentence combinations for creating fun stories.
• Easy to play. It's easy to build sentences, adding words from left to the right. Words have symbols giving you confidence in the next words to play.
• One-player and 2 to 4 player modes for indulging in your new addiction and sharing it with friends and family.
• Several Strategies. With thousands of sentence combinations and four ways to earn points, you have multiple options for winning. Match sentence patterns, find your flock of birds, and building big-bodacious sentences are all fun ways to earn points.
• Expandable. Add interrogative and compound sentences with the Level 2 expansion deck. This more than doubles the sentence possibilities.

Besides being easy and fun for beginner readers and English language learners, Birds and Words uses the 5 parts of a sentence and the 8 parts of speech. It's an ideal activity that complies with many national and state English curriculum standards. See the Educator's Guide for more details. Players using both card levels learn about the 4 verb types (transitive, intransitive, linking, helping), nouns as subjects and direct objects, adverbs and adjectives, relative and personal pronouns, and conjunctions. English's core sentence patterns are front and center during gameplay. Birds and Words makes learning English grammar a fun, creative, and rewarding personal achievement event.