St. Mark’s 4th Graders Win National Vocabulary Contest
The St. Mark’s School of Texas fourth-grade class has been named the national champion in their division of the 2022-2023 WordMasters Challenge, an annual national vocabulary competition among nearly 125,000 students.
The team scored a perfect 200 points in the last of three competition meets this year. Their final cumulative score was 588 out of 600.
Lauren Fischer, Shannon Nadalini, and Lee-Ann Graham coached the team.
“The class of 2031 spurred each other on throughout this entire year to reach this collective goal,” Fischer said. “I’m so proud of the final outcome, but mostly I was overjoyed to see these guys come together to encourage each other when they were challenged, to form study groups in preparation for the challenges, and celebrate each other’s achievements rather than just their own individual scores.”
The WordMasters Challenge is a critical thinking exercise that encourages students to become familiar with a set of new words then use those words to complete analogies expressing various kinds of logical relationships.
Twelve students received a perfect score of 20 in the recent meet; nationally, 45 fourth graders received this result.
Benny McCombie also earned the individual highest honors in the overall competition with a cumulative score of 59 out of 60 points. Thomas Hayes, Vihaan Jain, Christopher Kersey, and Andrew Tevis all earned cumulative scores of 58 points and qualified for highest honors, which are reserved for students among the top 10 to 15 in their divisions.
