COBB— A student representing Cobb Mountain Elementary recently received a perfect score in the first of three meets in this year’s WordMasters Challenge—a national vocabulary competition involving nearly 125,000 students annually.
Competing in the competitive Blue Division of the WordMasters Challenge, fourth grader Sage Moore earned a perfect score of 20 on the challenge. Nationally, only 52 fourth graders achieved this result. Other students from Cobb Mountain Elementary who achieved outstanding results in the meet include fifth grader Lily Morita and sixth grader Brooke Watson.
Cobb Mountain Elementary teachers (Allison Rodgers and Angela Stevenson) coached students in preparation for the WordMasters Challenge.
Aram Osterlye, the new principal for Cobb Mountain Elementary School in Middletown Unified School District, noted that 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.
School officials added that 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. Administrators said 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 New Jersey which is dedicated to inspiring high achievement in American schools. Further information is available at the company’s website: http://www.wordmasterschallenge.com.
