For many years now, sis Petra Ho has been on a mission to evangelize through education. Her ministry aims to share the love of Christ in an indirect but tangible way through providing an affordable and fun language and phonics education for children. At the same time, Shuffle Champ competitions are built as family events in which parents are treated to a wholesome movie while their children are building up their language and spelling skills.
In its essential description, Shuffle Champ is a wordgame with its own reading program. This set of 7 colour-coded blocks is a great tool for spelling. A few years ago, a church in Penang noticed the strengths of Shuffle Champ and began to use these blocks for a Spelling Competition coupled with games and gospel. A total of 180 students participated in that first event, and many other churches, including Kajang Assembly of God and Radiant Life Assembly, have started to pick up and participate in the program since then.
Recently, Shuffle Champ Spelling Competition was held for its third consecutive year at Subang Jaya Assembly. Under the supervision of Sis Joanne Yong and her wonderful team from the church, a total of 82 students from various schools participated. The program integrated games, the spelling competition and the sharing of the Gospel message through a puppet show.
Shuffle Champ was planned from the get-go to cover a huge range of ages, and children of 4-12 years participated. Sis Petra communicated that this being the 3rd year it has been held at the same church, she decided collectively with Subang Jaya Assembly to invest a bit of challenge into the competition. This year’s spelling list of words for ages 6-10 got harder.
This is also the year in which Shuffle Pro, the “7-letter word jackpot” with a different formula for the 11-12 year olds was introduced. Instead of the usual spelling of words, the players played against each other to form words. They had to think of their own words with the letters on top of the blocks after a throw. Shuffle Pro is a much more challenging format for the older children. The longer the word the higher the score. Points were awarded for every new word formed. Taking the concept of anagrams, players could add, remove, change, or replace 1 letter from a previous word to form a new word. The game ends at the 10 round or after a player hits a jackpot with the formation of a 7-letter word.
Players came for a practice a week before the competition to get familiarized with the game. Building on the first word formed which was seed, Daryl Yeap went to form weed, need, deed, feed and finally hit the jackpot with the word feeding. The Runner- up was Kieran Ong whose first word was paid. He then formed raid, rid, bid, bin, win and finally hit the jackpot with the word winners. The teachers were impressed that they could hit the jackpot.
One English school teacher, Evangeline Wong, gave a few words during the prize-giving ceremony on the importance of spelling as spelling or dictation classes were held every week in her school. She went on to say that they hope to have a bigger spelling competition next year and will also introduce Shuffle Pro to the 10 year olds as well.
Shuffle Champ is part of a larger ministry under the inspiration given by the Lord upon sis Petra Ho. Her ministry also includes the Bible Phonics Program, which is a Bible and phonics-based reading program. In 2014, Christianity Malaysia chatted with sis Petra to discover the story behind the inspiration as well as her aspirations. To learn more about the program, you may read more about it in our write-up.
NOTE: Sis Petra will be part of a seminar for parents and educators to be held at Canaanland Ara Damansara on the 6th of August in which she will speak about the Bible Phonics program. To find out more visit their website All photos kindly contributed by the event organisers.
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Jason Law
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