Good Morning! Happy New Year!
I have some great news to brag about today!! As we work hard as a school community to help each student at Woodland SOAR (succeed, outshine, achieve at high levels, and reach their highest potential), we need to celebrate evidence of success. Here is a BIG piece of evidence!
A team of students representing Woodland recently won highest honors in the WordMasters Challenge – a national language arts competition entered by approximately 220,000 annually, which consists of three separate meets held at intervals during the school year.
Competing in the difficult Blue Division of the Challenge, and coached by Mrs. Nicole Ewing, the school’s fourth graders tied for seventh place in the nation in the year’s first meet, held in December, among 698 school teams competing at this grade level and in this division.
Two of the school’s students earned highest honors for individual achievement as well: Fourth grader Anika Deshpande and fifth grader Amelia Lund both earned perfect scores in the meet, which in the entire country only 62 fourth graders and only 130 fifth graders did so.
Other students who achieved outstanding results in the meet included third graders Amber Prock, Ethan Tran, and Sydney Pollmann; fourth graders Christa Aasare, Owen Douglas, Andrew Mantini, Jacob Prosch, Matthew Seawood, Abigail Whittemore, Kyra Balentine, Jonathan Christianson, Lindy Oujiri, Taylor Quan, Kaylie Toleno, and Sydney Warcken; fifth graders Hayden Audette, Logan Fisher, Corey Hines, Sawyer Hoff, Vincent Kroll, Blake Loughrey, Patrick McArdle, Zoe Vanden Berk, Maya Bidwell, Madison Gute, Anna Heltemes, Kailee Hillman, Nicholas Krolnik, and Andy Sukhram; and sixth graders Emily Anderson, Lyria Gansop, Ryan Peterson, Jake Wulff, Henry Huynh, Diane Nyugen, Skyler Walz, and Matthew Zethren.
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 Challenge analogies helps students learn to think both analytically and metaphorically. 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.
Congratulations to Mrs. Ewing, the fourth grade teaching team, and the students in Mrs. Ewing's reading class! Your Woodland community is very proud of you!
Congratulations, also, to all the other third through sixth graders who received special recognition for their achievement in the WordMasters competition! Many thanks to Mrs. Jennifer Leslie for her coordination of the WordMasters program.
WordMasters is a rigorous program that requires the students to study and apply their knowledge at high levels. All children who participate in WordMasters, whether they receive recognition or not, are growing in their reading skill level and vocabulary usage! Congratulations to each of the students participating in the program!
WE, the Woodland Elementary school community, are working together to help every student SOAR! This is one more example to show that we are making a difference!
Have a great rest of your week!
Linda
.