WordMasters Challenge.

WORDMASTERS

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 2011

A team of students representing Wandell School recently won highest honors in the WordMasters Challenge—a national language arts competition entered by approximately 220,000 students annually, which consists of three separate meets held at intervals during the school year.

 Competing in the difficult Blue Division of the Challenge, and coached by Rosalie English, the school's third graders placed first in the nation in the year's second meet, held in February, among 521 school teams competing at this grade level and in this division.  Ten of the school's students won highest honors for individual achievement, while in the entire country only 99 third graders and only 50 fourth graders did so.

The WordMasters Challenge is an exercise in critical thinking that first encourages students to become familiar with a set of interesting new words (considerably harder than grade level), and then challenges them to use those words to complete analogies expressing various kinds of logical relationships. Working to solve the Challenge analogies helps students learn to think both analytically and metaphorically. Though most vocabulary-boosting and analogy-solving activities have been created for high school students the WordMasters materials have been specifically designed for younger students, in grades three through eight. They are particularly well suited for able and interested children, who rise to the challenge of learning new words and enjoy the logical puzzles posed by analogies.

The WordMasters Challenge has been administered for the past 24 years by a company based in Allendale, New Jersey, which is dedicated to inspiring high achievement in American schools. The students will participate in one more WordMasters meet during the coming months, and medals and certificates will be awarded in June to those who have achieved and/or improved the most in the course of the year.