St. James students score in WordMasters Challenge

From left, Megan Coakley, Alli Villane, Dan Fallon, Matthew Horbacz, Molly McNamara, Nicole Montano, Jessica Gonzalez, Samantha Guastella, Connor McNamara and Ralston Hough. RED BANK - - Four students representing Saint James School recently won highest honors in this year's WordMasters Challenge, a national language arts competition entered by more than 225,000 students annually, which consists of three separate meets held at intervals during the school year.

Competing in the difficult Blue Division of the challenge, fifth-grader Ralston Hough and eighth- graders Daniel Fallon, Jessica Gonzalez and Nicole Montano all earned perfect scores in the year's first meet, held in December. In the entire country, only 192 fifth-graders and 118 eighth- graders earned perfect scores.

Other students at the school who also achieved outstanding results in the meet were fifth-graders Megan Coakley, Connor McNamara and Ali Villane; sixth-grader Matthew Horbacz and eighth-graders Samantha Guastella and Molly McNamara. The school's students were coached in preparation for the challenge by Elizabeth Powell.

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 words to complete analogies expressing various kinds of logical relationships.

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 students will participate in two more meets in the coming months, and medals and certificates will be awarded in June to those who achieve and/or improve the most in the course of the year.