Marie’s Words: Picture Words – In a Flash!

Marie’s Words description:

Marie’s Words is the work of a high school junior who was preparing for the SAT. It’s original illustrations convey the meaning of these 550 words used in literature and on standardized tests. In addition, Marie’s Words provides the correction pronunciations, definitions, synonyms and antonyms, and sentences structured to the SAT standards. This learning tool delivers an easier way to learn and retain word meanings, attain success on exams, and improve diction for both writing and speaking.

My Thoughts:

Marie’s Words is a fun, visual way to expand your vocabulary and prepare for standardized testing. The 550 colorful, sturdy cards have all of the information you need to suppliment your language art homeschool curriculum or use as a stand alone study tool. One of my favorite features of these cards is the already punched hole in the corner of the cards, so you can put them on an o-ring for learning on the go.

I found myself learning new words as I looked over these cards. The format makes remembering definitions easier. The interesting pictures help cement the definitions into your memory. I appreciated the pronunciation key as I don’t always know how to pronounce a word. (Have you ever read a word over and over again, but when you hear it for the first time, you realize that you’ve been pronouncing it wrong in your head all along? No? Well, maybe that’s just me then. Either way, I know that I appreciated knowing how the words are suppose to be pronounced.) The synonyms and antonyms also help clarify the meaning of the word and will help with test taking and writing skills. The sentences allow students to get use to the sentence format of standardized tests.

All that is wonderful, but it doesn’t do any good if the child won’t use the cards, right? Well, that’s when the game suggestions come into play. There are two suggestions that come in the box – Picture Words and Marie’s Wordsmith.

Picture words tends to end up in a good bit of laughter as players try to guess the definition of the word using only the picture. As you can imagine, there are some pretty creative answers that come out of this game. The great thing is that everyone (including mom and dad) are learning and increasing their vocabulary during game play.

Marie’s Wordsmith is a little more involved as you have to come up with sentences that use the vocabulary word being given. While this one wasn’t quite as fun, it still ended up with some laughter due to some of the sentences being written. The goal is to create solid sentences as the players want people to think that their sentence is the Marie’s Words sentences. (There is more involved than just that, but it works for the purpose of keeping this review shorter.)

Overall, I feel these cards are a fun way to incorporate vocabulary into your homeschool or just daily life. They would also be great to use for posting a word for the day.

What you receive:

• 1 cardboard storage box
• 550 sturdy vocabulary cards
• game ideas sheet
• information about app version (available for iPhone, iPad, and Android)

Marie’s Words is available at Timberdoodle for $23.99 at the time of the writing of this review. To stay up-to-date on sales, you can follow Timberdoodle on Facebook.