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 approximately 215,000 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 William Lewis earned a perfect score in the year's first meet, held in December. In the entire country only 15 seventh graders achieved perfect results. Seventh grader Kathryn Miller also earned outstanding results in the meet. The school's students were coached in preparation for the Challenge by Cathy Moseley.

 

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 youth, who rise to the challenge of learning new words and enjoy the logical puzzles posed by analogies.

 

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