Washburne Students Place 1st, 4th in National Language Arts Competition

Two teams of students representing Carleton Washburne School recently won highest honors in the WordMasters Challenge—a national language arts 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, and coached by Jennifer Bertacchi and Maureen Etter, the school’s seventh graders placed fourth place in the nation in year-end cumulative standings among 291 school teams participating at this grade level and in this division. At the same time, the school’s eighth graders placed first in the nation among 301 competing teams.

Five of the school’s students won highest honors for year-long individual achievement as well: Seventh graders Claire Avril and Matthew McShea, each of whom made only two mistakes in the course of the year’s three meets, both placed among the 27 highest-ranked seventh graders in the entire country in the year-end standings. Eighth grader Murphy McQuet, who made only two mistakes in the meets for this grade level, was one of the three highest-ranked eighth graders nationwide, while his teammates Will Seaman and Shelby Kosanovich, who made only three mistakes, placed among the 14 highest-ranked eighth graders nationally.

Other students who achieved outstanding results in the final meet included seventh graders Claire Avril, Julia Green, Maisie Heitman, L.O. Hess, Matthew McShea, Sam Selati, Emily Achuck, Piers Braunrot, Claeigh DeWitt, Martin Duffy, Sammy Durbin, Nicky Hochchild, Will, Kohr, Max MacRitchie, Anna Maynard, Jake Paschen, Joel Riechers, Sara Schuham, Caroline Thompson, Clara Troyano-Valls, Charlie Williams, and Drake Zimmerman; and eighth graders Shannon Brooks, Maggie Gelber, Jack Junge, Shelby Kosanovich, David Vishny, Callie Walsh, Amelia Barron, Paige Baskin, Chloe Brittingham, Malcolm Durning, Bryan Freres, Alex Kaplan, Libby Kernahan, Natalie Moag, Charlie Nash, and Ben Scharf.

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 23 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 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.