Anya Kuzik wins WordMasters honors

SPARTA-A student representing Mohawk Avenue School recently won highest honors in this year's WordMasters Challenge n a national language arts competition, entered by over 240,000 students annually. Competing in the Blue Division of the Challenge, fifth-grader Anya Kuzik earned a perfect score in the year's third meet, held in April. In the entire country only 371 fifth-graders earned perfect scores. Other students from the school who also achieved outstanding results in the meet were fifth-graders Nick Bachman, Greg Allan, Mark Kaplan, Colby Isenberg, James Crawford, Erika Veidis, Kerry Filtz, Elena Insley and Joss Koss. The students were coached in preparation for the Challenge by Morgan Bleakley. The WordMasters Challenge is an exercise in critical thinking which first encourages students to become thoroughly familiar with a set of new words - considerably harder than grade level - and then challenges them to use those words to complete analogies expressing various kinds of logical relationships. The reasoning ability developed by students participating in the Challenge is like the aptitude measured for high school juniors and seniors by the verbal SAT I exam. The WordMasters word lists and analogies, however, have been specifically designed to challenge younger students in grades three through eight. Medals and certificates were awarded to those students who achieved and/or improved the most in the course of the year.