Winnetka Middle Schoolers Earn Highest Honors At Wordmasters

From District 36 Schools: Two teams representing Carleton Washburne School recently earned Highest Honors in the 2017-18 WordMasters Challenge™—a national vocabulary competition involving nearly 150,000 students annually. The seventh grade team scored 194 points out of a possible 200 in the last of three meets this year, placing first in the nation. In addition, the eighth grade team scored 181 in the recent meet to place ninth nationwide.

The seventh graders also placed first nationally in the overall competition with a cumulative score of 561 points out of a possible 600. The eighth graders earned a seventh place finish nationwide with a cumulative score of 549 points.

Competing in the difficult Blue Division of the WordMasters Challenge™, seventh graders Butler Chessen, Charlie LeVaughn-Bakos, Mike Polachek and Leah Raimo, and eighth grader George Ware each earned a perfect score of 20 in the recent meet. Nationally, only 14 seventh graders and 43 eighth graders achieved this result. Other students at Carleton Washburne who achieved outstanding results in the last meet of the year include seventh graders Nate Bailey, Declan Bornhoeft, Angelika Dugandzic, Juliette Hulsizer, Reese Hutchen, Evelyn Orsic, Eleanor Proctor, Alani Rampersad and Maddie Sell, and eighth graders Meeghan Jakob, Liam Kamphuis and Alex Pigott.

Seventh graders Juliette Hulsizer (58 points), Butler Chessen (56 points), Evelyn Orsic (56 points), Charlie LeVaughn-Bakos (55 points) and Mike Polachek (55 points), and eighth graders Liam Kamphuis (58 points) and George Ware (57 points) earned individual Highest Honors in the overall. Highest Honors are reserved for students who place among the top 10-15 students in their division.

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.

Photo via District 36