Fairmont Newsroom

Anaheim Hills Students Ace WordMasters Competition

May 2009

Anaheim, CA, May 29, 2009 - Five students representing Fairmont Private Schools Anaheim Hills campus recently won highest honors in this year's WordMasters Challenge-a national language arts competition entered by over 230,000 students annually, which consists of three separate meets held at intervals during the school year.

Competing in the difficult Blue Division of the Challenge, seventh grader Supriya Bhupathy made only two errors in the course of the year's three meets. Supriya placed among the 16 highest-scoring seventh grade students in the entire country in the Challenge’s year-end cumulative standings.

Four of the school’s students won recognition for outstanding achievement in the year's final meet as well: fourth graders Jonathan Joel, Ethan Kwan, and Jack Renton, and sixth grader Paige Miller. Nationwide only 180 fourth graders and 68 sixth graders did so.

Other students who achieved impressive results in the year's final meet included fourth graders Kaden Muneer, John Scavo, Terrell Shaffer, Vera Wang, Brandon Ann, Helena DuPont, Cole Morley, Gabby Romero, and Maya Woodworth; fifth graders Brandon Kim, Nicole Kuntjoro, Nicky Crosson, and Lauren Lee; sixth grader Yvonne Kim; and eight graders Dominique Fahmy, Krystyn Neisess, and Marish Patel. The students were coached in preparation for the Challenge by Taryn Stickrath-Brown, Marcy Cornish, Christie Shen, Sheila Arias, and Nancy Sturman.

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 relationships. Working to solve the 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 22 years by a company based in Allendale, New Jersey, which is dedicated to inspiring high achievement in American schools. Now that all three of the year’s meets have been completed, medals and certificates will be awarded to those students who achieved and/or improved the most in the course of the year.