CWA students excel at WordMasters Challenge

From Charles Wright Academy's Wright Back At Blog: Bathtub is to faucet as teapot is to stove? Fume? Spurt? Saucer? Spout? A team of students from the Lower School at Charles Wright Academy knew the answer and it helped them beat out teams from 519 other American elementary schools to win highest honors in the WordMasters Challenge – a national language arts competition entered by approximately 220,000 students annually. Competing in the difficult Blue Division and coached by Deanne Trummert and Jon Flies, the school's third graders tied for first place in the nation in the year's second of three meets.

Eight of CWA's students earned perfect individual scores for their grade levels as well: Third graders Maria Gonzalez, Avalyn Lara, Emily Saletan, Brenna Sclair, Helen Whitney, and Heidi Xu, and fifth graders Emma Jones and Grace Lee were among only 93 third graders and 275 fifth graders to ace the test.

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 Challenge analogies help 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 are 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 23 years by a company based in Allendale, New Jersey, which is dedicated to inspiring high achievement in American schools. The students will participate in one more meet during the coming months, and medals and certificates will be awarded in June to those who achieve and/or improve the most in the course of the year.