Archive: Around Town

Three students 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, sixth grader Mikaela Garcia, and seventh graders Nico Streb and Lisa Yoo all earned perfect scores in the year's first meet, held in December. In the entire country, only 120 sixth graders and 57 seventh graders earned perfect scores.

 

Mikaela Garcia, Nico Streb and Lisa Yoo all earned perfect scores in the December Wordmasters meet

Other students at the school who also achieved outstanding results in the meet included fifth graders Ishika Gupta, Samantha Sanito, Jenna Bizzell, and Andrew Galvin; sixth graders Zoltan Csaki, Miya Kuramoto, Leigh Miller, Aaron Segal, Jacob Williamson, and Megan Willkens; and seventh grader Caroline Taylor. The school's students were coached in preparation for the meet 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 (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 children, who rise to the challenge of learning new words and enjoy the logical puzzles posed by analogies.

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