Word masters

Have you heard of the Word Masters program?

I was introduced to this program a few years ago by Joanne Kyle (Whitewater Middle School). This was an opportunity that she offered to her advanced middle school students.  It is a competition/challenge that happens three times a year. Students are given lists of words to get to know well. For the challenges, the words are used in deeper-level thinking analogies.  Local high scorers receive a medal and top scores are also sent on to the national level.

This program is especially useful because it can be used as a pre-packaged enrichment opportunity for students.  In addition, there are two levels of competition: blue (regular) and gold (advanced), thus making it easy to choose the right level of challenge.

In my district, we’ve taken this a step farther to make it a true extension activity:  Students study nuances of the words and the root words behind them so that they have a broader knowledge base that can be called on in the future, and with similar words.  When competitions come around, scores have been higher than we’d expect, and there is a lot of buy-in from students.

Word Masters is not free, but the pricing structure can be found on their website at https://www.wordmasterschallenge.com/.

Stacci Barganz
WATG Board Member

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