Archive: Around Town

Five students 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.

Completing in the difficult Blue Division of the Challenge, eighth graders Agi Csaki, Lucy Rogers and Jonathan Sun earned perfect scores in each of the year’s three meets.  Sixth grader Meeta Shrivastava made only two mistakes over the course of the year’s three meets.  They placed, respectively, among the seven highest-scoring eighth graders, and 19 highest-scoring sixth graders in the entire country in the Challenge’s year-end cumulative standings.

In addition to Agi, Lucy, and Jonathan, another of the school’s students won recognition for outstanding achievement in the year’s final Challenge meet as well:  Sixth grader William Lewis earned a perfect score in their meet, where nationwide only 67 sixth graders did so.

Other students who achieved impressive results in the year’s final meet included sixth graders Arin Caveney, and Kathryn Miller, and seventh grader Emily Rasmussen.

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 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 22 years by a company based in Allendale, New Jersey, which is dedicated to inspiring high achievement in American schools.  Now that all three of the year’s meets have been completed, medals and certificates will be awarded to those students who achieved and/or improved the most in the course of the year.

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