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Elizabeth Duda, a seventh-grade student at Carleton Washburne Middle School in Winnetka, recently tied for first place in the WordMasters Challenge national vocabulary competition.
Competing in the Blue Division, Duda tied with four other students with a near-perfect score of 59 out of 60. Four more students competing in the Gold Division also registered the same score in the competition of approximately 25,000 seventh graders. In all, more than 150,000 students participated in the national competition that includes third through eighth graders.
"Unlike other language arts competitions for this age group – which focus on grammar, punctuation, spelling and other language mechanics – the WordMasters Challenge helps students to think both analytically and metaphorically," the competition's organizers posted on its on its website. "The contest addresses higher-level word comprehension and verbal reasoning in two ways. It bases the analogies on special vocabulary lists, developed for each grade and difficulty level by experienced teachers, which participants study before each meet. And it challenges students to complete analogies based on relationships among words they have learned."
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