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kathryn001Kathryn MillerA student representing Lansing Middle School recently 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, eighth grader Kathryn Miller made only three errors over the course of the year’s three meets.  By achieving such outstanding cumulative results, she was one of the highest-scoring eighth graders in the entire country this year.

Others who also earned impressive results in the year’s third meet held in April included eighth graders William Lewis and Adele Ferris.  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 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 24 years by a company based in Allendale, New Jersey, which is dedicated to inspiring high achievement in American schools.

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