Ramsey Kid 'WordMasters' Win Back-to-Back National Championships

Fourth and fifth graders from Dater School compete three times each year in the Wordmasters Challenge, a national competition that tests vocabulary and analogy skills.

In March, a group of fourth graders from Dater School earned a national championship for their scores on the exam. And now, the Ramsey WordMasters have done it again.

Dater’s fourth grade team placed first in the nation in this year’s second WordMasters meet, which consists of tests given to about 150,000 students across the country. The Ramsey students scored the highest of 471 teams participating in their division.

According to Wordmasters, the Ramsey team scored 195 points out of a possible 200.

According to a release from the school, fourth graders Rick Jin, Brendan Bussiere, Caroline Monaco, Patrick Chambers and Kayleigh McNeil, and fifth grader Conor Shovlin each earned a perfect score of 20 in the meet. Nationally, only 63 fourth graders and 75 fifth graders achieved a perfect score. 

Other students from the school who achieved outstanding results in the meet include fourth graders Giana Russo, Maxwell Oliver, Alexandra Kenny, Alexander Vigorito, Robin Falkow, Michael Nunziata and Ashling Bourke; and fifth graders Tess O’Hara, Will Edelson and Owen Les.

The students are trained for the exam by fourth grade teachers Deanna O’Hern, Kristine Groenveld, Jeanne Ferretti, and Julie Gulino. The test is administered by the school’s enrichment teacher Jennifer Borghoff.

“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,” a Dater release explained. “Working to solve the analogies helps students learn to think both analytically and metaphorically.”

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