Archive: Around Town

Lisa YooSeveral students representing Lansing Middle School recently received perfect scores in the second of three meets for this year’s WordMasters Challenge™—a national vocabulary competition involving nearly 150,000 students annually.

Competing in the difficult Blue Division of the WordMasters Challenge™, seventh graders Lena Gisler, Leigh Miller, Zoltan Csaki, and eighth grader Lisa Yoo earned perfect scores of 20 in the February meet.  Nationally, only 70 seventh graders and 31 eighth graders achieved a perfect score.

Other students at Lansing Middle School who achieved outstanding results in the meet include seventh graders Megan Willkens, Aaron Segal, and Mikayla Garcia.  The students were coached in preparation for the WordMasters 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 analogies helps students learn to think both analytically and metaphorically.


Although most vocabulary enrichment and analogy-solving programs are designed for use by high school students, WordMasters Challenge™ materials have been specifically created for younger students in grades three through eight.  They are particularly well suited for children who are motivated by the challenge of learning new words and enjoy the logical puzzles posed by analogies.

The WordMasters Challenge™ program is administered by a company based in Indianapolis, Indiana, which is dedicated to inspiring high achievement in American schools.

v9i14