A team representing Newtown Public Schools achieved Highest Honors in the recent WordMasters Challenge.

The event is a national vocabulary competition involving nearly 125,000 students annually. The eighth grade team scored 170 points out of a possible 200 in the first of three meets this year, placing ninth in the nation, according to an announcement about the accomplishment.

Superintendent of Schools Chris Melillo shared a congratulatory comment to the team at the Board of Education’s meeting on January 17.

While the team represented Newtown Middle School, it included students from Reed Intermediate School. Competing in the difficult Gold Division of the WordMasters Challenge, students from Newtown Public Schools who achieved outstanding results in the meet include sixth grader Hope Kenney, seventh grader Lyla Bshara, and eighth graders Duncan Kolb and Elias Kolb. The students were coached in preparation for the WordMasters Challenge by Cheryl McCaffrey at Reed and Eric Myhill at NMS.

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, an announcement reads. 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.

The Newtown Public Schools team included eighth grade students Victoria Abukhovich, Victoria Baghdady, Henry Baraw, Jolene Brackett, Grace Cooney, Ava Geiger, Caroline Kaufmann, Arthur Khisyamov, Duncan Kolb, Elias Kolb, Orion Lowery, Spencer Maddox, Ana Morris, Tyler Paul, Henri Quirk, Claire Smith, and Ethan Shpak; seventh grade student Lyla Bshara; and sixth grade student Hope Kenney.

For more information about WordMasters Challenge see its website at wordmasterschallenge.com.