Archive: Around Town

Lansing seventh grader William Lewis 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 very difficult Blue Division of the Challenge, William made only three errors in the course of the year’s three meets.  He is one of the 15 highest-scoring seventh graders in the entire country in the year-end cumulative standings.


Other students at the school who also earned impressive results in the year’s third meet included fifth graders Lisa Yoo and Hannah Overstrom, and seventh grader Kathryn Miller.  The 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 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 Word Masters 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 23 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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