Arlington Science Focus School fifth grader Noah Tejirian recently received a perfect score in the second of three meets in this year’s WordMasters Challenge™—a national vocabulary competition involving nearly 150,000 students annually.

Competing in the very difficult Gold Division of the WordMasters Challenge™, Tejirian earned a perfect score of 20 on the challenge. Nationally, only 61 fifth graders achieved this result. Noah was coached in preparation for the WordMasters Challenge™ by Aileen Mavity.

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.

The WordMasters Challenge™ program is administered by a company based in Indianapolis, Indiana, which is dedicated to inspiring high achievement in American schools. Further information is available at the company’s website:  http://www.wordmasterschallenge.com.