The Villager Newspaper Online Your Community News – Cleveland's Westshore
A team representing Westlake Dover Intermediate School recently earned Highest Honors in the 2024-2025 WordMasters Challenge™ — a national vocabulary competition involving nearly 125,000 students annually. The sixth grade team scored an impressive 174 points out of a possible 200 in the last of three meets this year, placing tenth in the nation.
The sixth graders also placed sixth nationally in the overall competition with a cumulative score of 508 points out of a possible 600.
Competing in the very difficult Gold Division of the WordMasters Challenge™, students at Dover Intermediate School who achieved outstanding results in the last meet of the year include sixth grader Cameron Wenham.
Sixth grader Ariella VanHoose earned Individual Highest Honors in the overall competition with a cumulative score of 59 out of a possible 60 points. Cameron Wenham also earned Highest Honors with a cumulative score of 54 points. Highest Honors are reserved for students who place among the top 10-15 students in their division.
The students were coached in preparation for the WordMasters Challenge™ by Donna Dieterich and Jessica Ranallo.
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.
The WordMasters Challenge™ program is administered by a company based in New Jersey which is dedicated to inspiring high achievement in American schools. Further information is available at the company’s website: www.wordmasterschallenge.com.
