Haverford Students Place 7th Nationally In WordMasters Challenge

HAVERTOWN, PA – A team of Manoa Elementary School fifth graders recently earned some high praise for their performance in a national vocabulary competition, according to the School District of Haverford Township.

The district said fifth grade team scored an impressive 189 points out of a possible 200 in the last of three WordMasters Challenge meets this year, placing seventh in the nation.

Roughly 150,000 students participate in the challenge annually.

Competing in the difficult Blue Division of the WordMasters Challenge, third grader Emily O’Hagan and fifth graders Gabe Elasser and Elia Koleth each earned a perfect score of 20 in the recent meet.

Nationally, only 68 third graders and 60 fifth graders earned perfect scores.

Other Manoa students who got outstanding results in the last meet of the year include fourth graders Ryan Dankanis and Hannah Nelson-Poteet, and fifth graders Jasmine Johnson, Aiden Liu, Jonah Lorah, Jude Lozano and Tyler Spears.

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.

Congratulations, students!

Image via School District of Haverford Township