News Releases
Paddock School Team Places First in Wordmaster Competition
A team of third- and fourth-grade students representing Stuart R. Paddock School recently placed first in the nation in the year-end cumulative standings of the Wordmaster Challenge, a national language arts competition entered by over 225,000 students annually. The Paddock team, supervised by teacher Kathleen Cochrane, was one of 724 school teams competing in the difficult blue division of the challenge.
The Wordmaster Challenge is an exercise in critical thinking which first encourages students to become familiar with a set of interesting new words (considerably harder than grade level), then challenges them to use the words to complete analogies expressing various kinds of relationships. Working to solve the Challenge analogies helps students learn to think both analytically and metaphorically. The contest consists of three separate meets held at intervals during the school year.
Two Paddock students also won highest honors for year-long individual achievement. Amanda Engel and Elizabeth Davies, who earned perfect scores in all three of the year’s meets, placed among the seven highest-scoring fourth graders in the entire country in the cumulative standings. Their classmates, third graders Brian Burton, Alec Stadler and Shannon Surell also achieved perfect scores on a fourth-grade test and were among the 29 highest ranked students at the fourth-grade level.
Nine students won highest honors for individual achievement in the year's final meet. Elizabeth Davies, Amanda Engel, Brian Burton, Jessica Hedrick, Fiona Helgren, Stephanie Gallo, Emily Pinderski, Laura Gleason, and Shannon Surell earned perfect scores in the meet. Nationwide only 98 fourth graders had perfect scores. In previous meets, perfect scores were also earned by Samantha Bartolai and Caitlyn Pagenkopf.
Medals and certificates will be awarded in June.
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