A team representing Conway Elementary achieved Highest Honors in the recent WordMasters Challenge™— a national vocabulary competition involving nearly 150,000 students annually. The third grade team scored an impressive 179 points out of a possible 200 in the second of three meets this year, placing seventh in the nation.
Competing in the difficult Blue Division of the WordMasters Challenge™, third grader Josie Stout and fourth grader Kimmi Lin each earned a perfect score of 20 on the challenge. Nationally, only 17 third graders and 24 fourth graders achieved this result. Other students from Conway Elementary who achieved outstanding results in the meet include third grader Tyler Hayes. The students were coached in preparation for the competition by Linda Armbruster and Kathryn Ward.
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 3-8. 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.