West Chicago student earns perfect score in WordMaster
One student representing West Chicago Middle School recently won highest honors in this year's WordMasters Challenge – a national language arts competition 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-grader Cristal Quinones earned a perfect score in the year's first meet held in December. In the entire country, only 62 eighth-graders achieved at this level.
Cristal started elementary school in District 33 as a Spanish speaker, and has acquired English to a level that allowed her to achieve a perfect score on other WordMaster Challenges while attending Currier Elementary School. As a sixth-grade student, she was also awarded the Arvila Currier Award, which is given to the students who most exhibit a love of learning, great effort and good citizenship.
Other students at the school who also achieved outstanding results in the meet included seventh-graders Jenna Palka, Emily Bono, Josh Bowen and eighth graders, Raynne Belingon, Ethan Cuka, Ethan Nizzi, Holly Schuning, Chris Arbudzinski, Daniel Cuautle, Keelyn O'Brien and Raven Ringe. The students prepared for the Challenge with the help of their Language Arts teachers and Patt Pentek, program coordinator.
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 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.
The WordMasters Challenge has been administered for the past 25 years by a company based in Allendale, New Jersey, which is dedicated to inspiring high achievement in American schools. The students will participate in two more meets in the coming months, and medals and certificates will be awarded in June to those who achieved and/or improved the most in the course of the year.