RMS Students Win Highest Honor’s in the WordMaster’s Challenge™
By: Claire Gearhart, BPS101 Communications Intern
A team from Rotolo Middle School recently won Highest Honor’s in the WordMaster’s Challenge™ by earning a total of 179 points out of a possible 200, placing them as seventh in the nation. Grace Elftwann, Kyle Star, Matthew Mefford, and Emily Newburn all achieved outstanding scores in the competition.
WordMaster’s Challenge™ is one that hold’s around 125,000 students yearly, and is “Unlike other language arts competitions for this age group – which focus on grammar, punctuation, spelling and other language mechanics – the WordMasters Challenge™ helps students to think both analytically and metaphorically,” according to the official website.
The students are aided by their ELA teachers in preparing for the competition. They each receive a set of 25 words, and they begin by studying the definitions of each of them. Teachers then use a variety of ways to help the students make connections with the words. Some of which may include “analogy practices, play[ing] games with the definitions, apply[ing] the words into projects and writing pieces, and/or creat[ing] connections between words (i.e synonyms and antonyms),” according to Jenny Knaris at RMS.
The competition is by no means easy, as it requires those competing to exercise their critical thinking skills while making connections between words that are far out of their grade’s difficulty level. They use these difficult words to solve analogies and logical puzzles for points. Impressively, sixth-grader Grace Elftwann and eighth-grader Kyle Star each earned a perfect score of 20 on the challenge. This is a fete completed only by 13 other sixth-graders and 13 eighth-graders in the nation. These amazing scores greatly aided the team to success at the competition.
This is the first of three rounds that these students will compete in. The results for the next competition will be made available on March 13th this year and BPS101 is excited to see how well the team performs!
