1/23/2024 -- A team representing Mason Ridge Elementary achieved the highest honors in the recent WordMasters Challenge™ — a national vocabulary competition involving nearly 125,000 students annually. The fifth-grade team scored an impressive 197 points out of a possible 200 in the first of three meets this year, placing first in the nation. 

Competing in the very difficult Gold Division of the WordMasters Challenge™, fourth graders Daniel Bastos, Beckham Johnson and Brooke Ringhofer, and fifth graders Sarah Adams, Izzy Blatnik, Tejas Guda, Joey Jordan, Matteo Maccotta, Harper Springman and Sylvi Walton each earned a perfect score of 20 on the challenge. Nationally, only 47 fourth graders and 38 fifth graders achieved this result. Other students from Mason Ridge who achieved outstanding results in the meet include third graders Elina Calabio, Ben Rutherford and Audrey Zhao; fourth graders Harper DeWitt and Ewan Kim; and fifth graders Angela Gong, Kenise Raines and Marie Zhu. The students were coached in preparation for the WordMasters Challenge™ by MOSAICS teacher Abby Webb.

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.