COBB, Calif. – A team representing Cobb Mountain Elementary recently earned Highest Honors in the 2016-17 WordMasters Challenge, a national vocabulary competition involving nearly 150,000 students annually.

The sixth grade team scored an impressive 177 points out of a possible 200 in the last of three meets this year, placing fifth in the nation.

Competing in the difficult Blue Division of the WordMasters Challenge, sixth grader Bea Rodgers earned a perfect score of 20 in the recent meet. Nationally, only 15 sixth graders achieved this result. 

Other students at Cobb Mountain Elementary who achieved outstanding results in the last meet of the year include fourth graders Ryan Taylor and Henry Thomas.

Sixth grader Bea Rodgers also earned Individual Highest Honors in the overall competition with a cumulative score of 57 of a possible 60 points. Highest Honors are reserved for students who place among the top 10-15 students in their division.

The students were coached in preparation for the WordMasters Challenge by Marc Morita, Mary Sutton, and Trina Vargas.

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.