- By Cathy Moseley
- Around Town
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Leigh Miller, Lisa Yoo, Mikaela Garcia Competing in the difficult Blue Division of the Challenge, seventh grader Lisa Yoo earned perfect results on each of the year’s three meets. By achieving perfect cumulative results on the seventh grade Challenge, Lisa was one of the seven highest-scoring seventh graders in the entire country. Sixth grader Mikaela Garcia made only one error over the course of the year’s three meets. Mikaela’s cumulative results placed her among the 19 highest-scoring sixth graders in the country this year.
In addition to Mikaela Garcia, sixth grader Leigh Miller received a perfect score on the year’s third meet. Nationally only 110 sixth graders earned perfect third meet scores.
Others who also earned impressive results in the year’s final meet included sixth graders Zoltan Csaki, Meghan Matheny, James Blair, and Aaron Segal, and seventh graders Jed Dewey, Sean O’Neil, Nico Streb, and Caroline Taylor. The students were coached in preparation for the Challenge by Cathy Moseley.
The WordMasters Challenge is an exercise in critical thinking that at 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.
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