The Booth Hill School fourth grade team achieved highest honors in the recent WordMasters Challenge — a national vocabulary competition involving nearly 150,000 students annually.
The fourth grade team scored an impressive 185 points out of a possible 200 in the second of three meets this year, placing third in the nation. In the first meet, Booth Hill School’s fourth grade team earned 182 of a possible 200 points and placed eighth in the nation.
Competing in the difficult Blue Division of the WordMasters Challenge, students from Booth Hill School who achieved outstanding results in the meet include fourth graders Robert Calandro, Samuel DeMartino, Autumn Desautels, William Gee, and Anna Ghaemialehashemi. In round one, Elaina Brilvitch, Samuel DeMartino, Finn Kilmartin, and Cara Vasser earned outstanding results. Hope Cotter, Martha Gaynor, Karen Keyes, Nicholas Messina, and Nancy Burns coached these students in preparation for the Challenge.
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, a press release said.
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 press release said.
The Challenge program is administered by a company based in Indianapolis, Ind. Further information is available at www.wordmasterschallenge.com.
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