Mohawk student wins WordMasters Challenge

SPARTA-A student representing Mohawk Avenue School recently won highest honors in this year's WordMasters Challenge, a national language arts competition consisting of three separate meets held at intervals during the school year and entered by more than 225,000 students annually. Competing in the Gold Division of the Challenge, fifth grader Erik Price earned a perfect score in the year's third meet, held in April. In the entire county, only 81 fifth graders earned perfect scores. Others at the school who also achieved outstanding results included fifth graders Katie Boryeskne, Dillon Feldman, Katie Clark, Evan Prickett, Nicki Schluter and James Sissler. The school's students were coached by Moargan Bleakley. The WordMasters Challenge is an exercise in critical thinking which first encourages students to become thoroughly familiar with a set of interesting new words and then challenges them to use those words to complete analogies expressing various kinds of logical relationships. The WordMasters word lists and analogies have been specifically designed to challenge younger students in grades three through eight. The WordMasters Company, based in Allendale, has sponsored the competition for elementary and middle school students at public, private, and parochial schools all across the country for the past eighteen years.