May 2016: 1st in Nation at 2015-2016 WordMasters Challenge

A team representing Nysmith School achieved Highest Honors in the 2015-2016 WordMasters Challenge™—a national vocabulary competition involving nearly 150,000 students annually.

The fourth grade team scored an impressive 197 points out of a possible 200 in the second of three meets this year, placing first in the nation.

Competing in the very difficult Gold Division of the WordMasters Challenge, fourth graders Cameron Ake, Ella Greene, Joseph Grossman, Aanya Kolli, Hanna Park, Claire Tarallo and Zani Xu each earned a perfect score of 20 on the challenge. Nationally, only 32 fourth graders achieved this result.

Other students from Nysmith School who achieved outstanding results in the meet include fourth graders Sahithi Atluri, Kinnari Chaubal, Samuel Cottrell, Jayden Johnson, Ryan Kim, Ava Lawless, Kelvin Nguyen, Amal Wooldridge and Brian Zhou. The students were coached in preparation for the WordMasters Challenge by Laura Buch and Aisha Enayatulla.

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.