Archive: Around Town

Junior Scott Williamson won the 2014 Shakespeare Competition offered recently at Lansing High School. Scott was one of four students who competed at the local level of the ‘National Shakespeare Competition’ sponsored by the English Speaking Union of the United States.  Scott next offers his recitation of a sonnet and twenty lines of a passage from a Shakespearean play at the Regional Competition on Saturday, March 1st at Syracuse’s Archibald Theatre of Syracuse Stage.

Other students who competed in this competition included runner up Elsa Brenner along with Nia Stipetic and Caroline Taylor.  Judges for Lansing’s competition included Ms. Julia Berens, Mrs. June Martin, and Miss Mary Beth Whittaker.

Two students representing Lansing Middle School also won highest honors in this year’s 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, seventh grader Emily Phillips earned a perfect score in the year’s first meet held in December.  In the entire country only 19 seventh graders achieved at this level.  At the eighth grade level, Mikaela Garcia scored a perfect score and was one of only eleven people in the nation to earn that score.

The WordMasters  Challenge is an exercise in critical thinking that first encourages students to become familiar with a set of interesting new words (considerable 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.

Students will compete in early February and again in April.  Congratulations to those who have chosen to become real Word Masters.

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