A team representing Grandview Heights Edison Intermediate (EI) achieved Highest Honors in the recent WordMasters ChallengeTM—a national vocabulary competition involving nearly 125,000 students annually. The EI fifth grade team scored an impressive 188 points out of a possible 200 in the first of three meets this year, placing eighth in the nation.

Competing in the difficult Blue Division of the WordMasters ChallengeTM, fifth grader Luca Reo and fourth grader Lola Van Ausdal each earned a perfect score of 20 on the challenge. Nationally, only 83 fifth graders achieved this result. The students were coached in preparation for the WordMasters ChallengeTM by Joan Grundey.

The WordMasters ChallengeTM 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 ChallengeTM 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.