Arcado Elementary Earns Highest Honor in 'WordMasters Challenge'

A team representing the fourth grade at Arcado Elementary School earned Highest Honors in the 2012-13 WordMasters Challenge™—a national vocabulary competition involving nearly 150,000 students annually. The students placed fourth in the nation with an impressive 187 points out of a possible 200 in the last of three meets this year.

Competing in the difficult Blue Division of the WordMasters Challenge™, fourth graders Anna Wang, Velda Wang and Alina Zhang, and fifth graders Jessica Pan and Isabel Segre  each earned a perfect score of 20 in the spring meet.  Nationally, only 55 fourth graders and 144 fifth graders achieved a perfect score.  Isabel Segre also achieved individual Highest Honors in her division by scoring a cumulative 58 points over the three meets.

Other students at Arcado Elementary School who achieved outstanding results in the final meet include: third grader Jamie Chen and Siya Deshpande; fourth graders Kylan Harding, Kay Lynn Tran and Leo Xu; and fifth grader Rhiannon Eplett.  The students were coached in preparation for the WordMasters Challenge™ by Kathy Dean and Kathe Gowland.

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.  Further information is available at the website:  http://www.wordmasterschallenge.com.