Archive: Around Town

A team representing the seventh grade at Lansing Middle School earned Highest Honors in the 2012-13 WordMasters Challenge™—a national vocabulary competition involving nearly 150,000 students annually. The students placed sixth in the nation with an impressive 185 points out of a possible 200 in the last of three meets this year.  Additionally, eighth grader Lisa Yoo achieved individual Highest Honors by scoring a cumulative 58 points on  the three Challenges.

Competing in the difficult Blue Division of the WordMasters Challenge™, fifth grader John Hern and seventh graders Lena Gisler and Mikaela Garcia each earned a perfect score of 20 in the third and final meet.  Nationally, only 144 fifth graders and 31 seventh graders achieved a perfect score.  Other students at Lansing Middle School who achieved outstanding results on the final meet include fifth graders Alex Rose and Thor Wierson, sixth graders Emily Phillips and Ellen Howell, and eighth graders Lisa Yoo and Hannah Overstrom.  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.

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