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Mount Kisco Boy Wins High Honors At National Vocabulary Competition

MOUNT KISCO, N.Y. -- Mount Kisco Elementary School fourth-grader Jack Loughney recently represented his school and achieved individual highest honors in the recent WordMasters Challenge, a national vocabulary competition involving nearly 150,000 students annually.

Jack Loughney, Mount Kisco Elementary School fourth-grader, earned top honors at Wordmasters Challenge.

Jack Loughney, Mount Kisco Elementary School fourth-grader, earned top honors at Wordmasters Challenge.

Photo Credit: Contributed

Competing in the Blue Division of the WordMasters Challenge, Jack achieved a perfect score of 20 on the third of three challenges held this school year. Nationally, only 50 fourth-graders achieved this result.

Jack, a student in Cheryl Pease’s fourth-grade class, is an avid reader who also swims for the Saw Mill Storm Swim Team and in his spare time enjoys playing Minecraft.

The students were coached in preparation for the WordMasters Challenge by Amy Unger, a tiered support teacher at Mount Kisco Elementary School.

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. 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 to eight.

They are particularly well-suited for children who are motivated by the challenge of learning new words and enjoy the logical puzzles posed by analogies.

The WordMasters Challenge program is administered by a company based in Indianapolis that is dedicated to inspiring high achievement in American schools.

For more information, visit www.wordmasterschallenge.com.

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