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June 2, 2009 - Three teams of students representing Fairmont Private School’s Mable campus recently won highest honors in the 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 very difficult Gold Division of the Challenge, the school’s third graders placed eleventh in the nation in the year-end cumulative standings, among 201 school teams participating at this level and in this division. The school’s fifth graders also placed eleventh in the nation (after tying for first place in the year’s final meet), in this case among 290 competing teams. And the school’s sixth graders tied for tenth place in the nation (after tying for eight place in the year’s final meet) among 198 teams. The teams were coached by Kellie Cameron, Jackie Williams, Ashley Peterman, and Donna Riley.

One of the school’s students won highest honors for year-long individual achievement as well.  Fifth grader Janet Doan, who made only two mistakes in the course of the year’s three meets, placed among the 21 highest-ranked fifth graders in the entire country in the year-end standings.  In addition, ten of the school’s students won highest honors for individual achievement in the year’s final meet, held in April.  Fourth grader Aleena Comanescu; fifth graders Jebb Baguioro, Julia Bok, Alec Hising, Emily Liu, and Michelle Phan; and sixth graders Alan Ann, Joshua Chen, Ryan Han, and Sonam Patel all earned perfect scores in this meet, while nationwide only 180 fourth graders, only 75 fifth graders, and only 68 sixth graders did so.

Other students who achieved outstanding results in the final meet included third graders Gurveer Singh and Alexis Duke; fourth graders Carissa Chen, E.J. Cho, Tara Falt, Tear Gilham, Shawnelle Nachawati, Caroline Yeo, Patty Martinez, Victoria Nguyen, McKenna Sainburg, John Wen, and Iris Wu; fifth graders Jade Audon, Janet Doan, Kitty Jia, Tanner Lemke, Liza Matthews, Anne Song, Francis Wu, Leanne Agulto, David Kwon, Derrick Li, Anisha Shah, Nicholas Vu, and Joanna Zhu; and sixth graders Lucky Jordan, Milan Mistry, Sharon Oh, Jessica Chung, Skylar Hess, Nathan Kang, Tori Lee, Nelson Liu, Morgan Nelson, Michael Niu, Ryan Treadwell, Emily Wang, and Jesse Wu.

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 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 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.