Aikin Elementary School student earns perfect score in WordMasters Challenge

Posted Date: 05/06/2019

Aikin Elementary School third grader Ivan Gonzalez earned a perfect score in the first of three meets in this year’s WordMasters Challenge, a national vocabulary competition involving nearly 150,000 students annually.

Competing in the difficult Blue Division, Gonzalez earned a perfect score of 20 on the challenge.  Nationally, only 30 third graders achieved this result. Gonzalez was coached by his Socrates teacher—Tammy King.

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.

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