A team of students representing L.J. Hauser Junior High School of Riverside won highest honors in the WordMasters Challenge, a national language arts competition held in May. More than 225,000 students enter the contest annually, which consists of three separate meets held during the school year.
A team of eighth graders supervised by Language Arts and Reading instructor Laurey Brodhay, tied for ninth place in the nation in the year-end cumulative standings, among 171 school teams participating at this level in the Gold Division.
Eighth-grader Nick Rohm earned perfect scores in all three of the year’s meets and was one of the two highest-ranked eighth-graders in the entire country in the year-end standings. Ryan Considine and Ben Mitchell also in eighth grade, earned perfect scores in the year’s final meet. Only 90 eighth graders nationwide achieved a perfect score in this meet.
Other Hauser students who excelled in the year’s final meet included sixth-graders Kathleen Falk, Lee Tang, Emma Veon, Jack Gibson and Annie Mitchell, and eighth-graders Jake Dluhy, Robin Jensen, Haley McCarthy, Austin McKain, Bob Bucchiere, Molly Ely, Wolfie Foulkes, Muriel Kelleher, Brian Robertson, Megan Welch and Bradley Wilson.
The WordMasters Challenge is an exercise in critical thinking which first encourages students to become familiar with a set of interesting new words, 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.