Two students representing Norfolk Collegiate Middle School recently won highest honors in this year’s WordMasters Challenge- a national language arts competition for middle school students entered by approximately 220,000 students annually, which consists of three separate meets held at intervals during the school year.

Competing in the very difficult Gold Division of the Challenge, eighth graders Aaron Boutwell and Helena Zirkle earned perfect scores in the year’s first meet, held in December. In the entire country only 62 eighth graders achieved at this level. Other students who also received outstanding results in the meet include eighth graders Tanner Hirschfeld and Maria-Alejandra Radiguet-Correa. The students were coached in preparation for the Challenge by Lindsey Belle.

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 Challenge analogies helps students to learn to think both analytically and metaphorically. Though most vocabulary-boosting and analogy-solving activities have been created for high school students, the WordMasters materials have been specifically designed for younger students in grades three through eight. They are particularly well suited for able and interested children, who rise to the challenge of learning new words and enjoy the logical puzzles posed by analogies.