Two students representing Crestwood Middle School achieved individual highest honors in the recent WordMasters Challenge — a national vocabulary competition involving nearly 150,000 students.
Competing in the Gold Division of the WordMasters Challenge, eighth graders Dalgis Mosqueda and Laura Sanchez achieved a perfect score of 20 on the third of three challenges held this school year. Nationally, only 46 eighth graders achieved this result.
Another student from Crestwood Middle School who achieved outstanding results in the meet is Noah Gorgevski-Sharpe.
The students were coached in preparation for the WordMasters Challenge by language arts teacher Penny Kudyba.
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, which is dedicated to inspiring high achievement in American schools.
For more information, visit www.wordmasterschallenge.com.
