Archive: Around Town

A student representing Lansing Middle School recently won highest honors in this year's WordMasters Challenge-a national language arts competition entered by over 230,000 students annually, which consists of three separate meets held at intervals during the school year.

Competing in the difficult Blue Division of the Challenge, fifth grader William Lewis earned a perfect score in the year's third meet, held in April. In the entire country only 96 fifth graders achieved at this level. Other students who also achieved outstanding results included fifth graders Kathryn Miller and Thomas Galvin.

The WordMasters Challenge is an exercise in critical thinking, which 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 young people, 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 21 years by a company based in Allendale, New Jersey, which is dedicated to inspiring high achievement in American schools.

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