Walker School Student Earns Perfect Score in WordMasters Challenge

A student representing Walker School recently won highest honors in this year’s WordMasters Challenge—a national language art competition entered by approximately 220, 000 students annually, which consists of three separate meets held at intervals during the school year.

Competing in the difficult Blue Division of the Challenge, fourth grader Anne Kuckertz earned a perfect score in the year’s first meet, held in December. In the entire country only 47 fourth graders achieved at this level. Others at the school who also achieved outstanding results in the meet included third graders Sam Robinson, Easton Gross, Nora Ewing and Connor Dietz, fourth graders Colin Chval,
Lindsay Knutson, Lily Podracky and Ashley Haggard, and fifth grader Madelyn Studnicka.

The students were coached in preparation for the Challenge by their classroom teachers. 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 Challenge analogies helps students learn to think both analytically and metaphorically. Though most vocabulary-boosting and analogy-solving activities have been created for high school students, the WordMasters materials have been specifically designed for younger students, in grades three through eight. They are particularly well suited for able and interested children,
who rise to the challenge of learning new words and enjoy the logical puzzles posed by analogies.

The WordMasters Challenge has been administered for the past 24 years by a company based in Allendale, New Jersey, which is dedicated to inspiring high achievement in American schools. The students will participate in two more WordMasters meets during the coming months, and medals and certificates will be awarded in June to those who achieve and/or improve the most in the course of the
year.