Hickey Elementary Third Grader Earns Rare Perfect Score on WordMasters Challenge

April 3, 2009

Hickey Elementary School third grade student Kate Hilton earned highest honors in this year's WordMasters Challenge - a national language arts competition entered by approximately 230,000 students annually, which consists of three separate meets held at intervals during the school year.

Competing in the difficult Blue Division of the Challenge, Kate Hilton earned a perfect score in the year's second meet held in February. In the entire country, only 109 third graders earned perfect scores. The school's students were coached in preparation for the Challenge by PACE (Plano Academic Creative Education) Teacher Peggy Billingsly.

"Third graders rarely get all twenty analogies correct even when they are very good at vocabulary and analytical thinking," Ms. Billingsly reported. "Twenty correct new analogies all at once is very difficult even for adults."

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.