Fourth Grade Wins National Vocabulary Challenge

The Class of 2029 has been named the national champion in the Gold Division of the WordMasters Challenge—an annual national vocabulary competition involving nearly 125,000 students. The team placed first in three separate events throughout the year, earning them the top cumulative score for the entire year (586 out of a possible 600). 

“These boys uplifted each other and really took their duties and responsibilities to the team seriously,” said Lauren Fischer, fourth-grade teacher who coached the boys. “What I loved most of all is that you could just see how much fun they had participating. That joy of learning was infectious and certainly spurred everyone on throughout the arduous journey that characterizes the prep leading up to the challenges.”
 
Five students earned Highest Honors for scoring near-perfect scores for the entire year: Nicholas Cho and Nate Saenz (59 out of a possible 60 points), and William Cho, Evan Kaufman, and Austin Wagner (58 points). Seven members of the Class of 2029 earned special recognition for earning a perfect score of 20 in the most recent meet (a feat achieved by only 51 fourth graders nationwide): Mukhil Ananth, George Brown, William Cho, Thomas Costa, Alekh Desai, Ishaan Siddamshetty, and Austin Wagner. 

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.