The WordMasters Challenge™ is a national competition for students in grades 3-8 that encourages growth in vocabulary and verbal reasoning.
The contest addresses higher-level word comprehension and verbal reasoning in two ways:
It challenges students to complete analogies based on relationships among words they have learned.
It bases the analogies on special vocabulary lists, developed for each grade and difficulty level, which participants study before each meet.
The students meet weekly as a group October-May to study their words by researching, playing games and thinking of these words more broadly. After studying their words, they are challenged to complete analogies using these very challenging words. For example, a recent analogy question looked like this: PERSON:SERENE::LAKE:_______. The correct answer is tranquil because when a person is serene, they are calm and peaceful. Therefore when a lake is calm and peaceful, it is tranquil.
The competition consists of 3 rounds of 25 vocabulary words. Students study the words and then take a test consisting of 20 analogies (this year the tests are November, February and April). Because of this format, the students must know more than just definitions, they must learn antonyms, synonyms, parts of speech, and use of the words in the context of a sentence.
Excellence in the competition requires both a mastery of the meanings of the vocabulary words and thoughtful reasoning about the relationships between these words.
All students are given a completion certificate and awards are given to top scorers in our school.
