September Newsletter: Stick Around App, Study Tools, 2015-16 Registration and Challenge Schedule.
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September Newsletter: Stick Around App, Study Tools, 2015-16 Registration and Challenge Schedule.
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October Newsletter: Packed full of resources to get the 2014-15 WordMasters Challenge started! | Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. |
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opyright © 2014 WordMasters, LLC, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you signed up for our newsletter at our website and/or you are a current WordMasters Challenge customer. Our mailing address is: 5702 N. Pennsylvania St., Indianapolis, IN 46220 | |
We often hear feedback from teachers, and we have started to share in our blog some of the great persuasive essays written by students hoping to start WordMasters teams in their new schools, but it's just as rewarding to hear from parents. Thank you, Terry, for sharing your thoughts with us!
"My daughters participated in WordMasters for 3 years each in elementary school. It was a large part of our elementary’s gifted enrichment program. I am SO happy they had this opportunity. For my oldest, an avid reader and for whom vocabulary is a cinch, this was a great self-confidence booster, and she enjoyed the friendly competition with her friends. For my youngest, who’s not a book lover and has a weaker vocabulary, this program guaranteed 75 new, quality words per year. AND when she excelled because we worked so hard to prepare, it made her feel really good about herself. Also, she will test with the SCAT soon, and I am thankful for all of the analogy practice she has had. THANK YOU!"
Terry V., Parent
Follow us on Twitter and play along as we tweet daily analogies. Analogies will be posted Monday through Friday, increasing in difficulty as the week progresses (like the NY Times Crossword Puzzle!). The number that appears before the analogy indicates the Challenge level where the analogy was previously used; for example, (4B) means the analogy appeared in a 4th Grade - Blue Division Challenge.
If you are unfamiliar with analogy notation, remember that a single colon (:) means "is to" and a double colon (::) means "as". So "black : white :: good : evil" reads "black is to white as good is to evil". Usually, we leave just the last term out, so to solve the analogy you choose the word that makes the most sense. Sometimes we leave the second part of the analogy out altogether, so you must choose a pair of words that have the same relationship as the first pair.
The correct answer to each day's analogy will be tweeted the following day.
Teachers, this is a great way to keep your students thinking analytically over the summer and between Challenge meets!
Good luck and have fun!
First Challenge Meet Team Leader Guide |
Dear Team Leaders: Welcome to the start of the 2013-14 WordMasters Challenge! Thank you for your patience and understanding as we worked through some of the technical glitches with our upgraded website. By now, you should have logged into the website to set up your team(s) and downloaded your Meet #1 Word Lists(s). If you experience any difficulty accessing your WordMasters account, please try the following before contacting us for assistance:
INSTRUCTIONS FOR MEET #1
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The Challenge Tests and Answer Keys will be available for download from your Dashboard on November 18th.
Schedule your Challenge Meet for any 20-minute period between November 18th – December 6th.
Enter your students’ scores online by December 13th. You can create a unique student record for each participant at any time by clicking on “Manage Teams & Students” from your Dashboard (no limit to number of students per team). More information regarding score submission will be sent to you before Challenge Meet tests are available for download. Important note: Due to the changes we have made to automate the score reporting process, we will no longer be able to accept scores beyond the posted deadline of December 13th. Please schedule your meet accordingly to ensure you are able to submit your scores on time.
A summary of results will be posted on our website and available for download on December 27th.
No need to wait until January to start preparing for the second Challenge Meet! Word Lists for Meet #2 will be available for download on December 9th.
NOTES TO TEAM LEADERS
Before the Meet
During the Meet
Challenge meets should last about 20 minutes (we do not impose a strict time limit) and should be conducted silently (i.e., the Team Leader should not read the analogies aloud). Students should work unassisted; they should not consult their Word Lists, definitions, or each other.
There is one circumstance in which limited help is permitted: If your students
encounter a word in the Challenge test which has not appeared on the Word Lists yet
is unfamiliar to them, you may define that word briefly. Please be sure that any
definition you give is not only brief and simple, but is also without reference to the
analogy in which the unfamiliar word appears. It is NOT permissible to define a word
that appeared on an earlier Word List (applies to Meets #2 and #3), nor one that is a derivative of any Word List vocabulary.
After the Meet
Don't forget to check out all the resources available to you through our website (Idea Gallery, Teacher Tools, FAQs, blog posts, WordMasters Basics, etc).
Good luck!
If you are reading this blog, you clearly have some interest in words, their origins and their usages. In that case, you should be following WordMasters on Twitter, as we tweet an Analogy of the Day (AOTD) from the WordMasters Challenge archives. On Monday, we tweet an analogy that originally appeared on a fourth grade Challenge test. The vocabulary gets progressively more difficult as we finish out the week by tweeting an analogy from an eighth grade Challenge test every Friday. We also tweet the correct answer the following day. To sign up for AOTD, follow us (@wordmasterslisa). If you don’t Twitter, you can catch the AOTD and corresponding answers by visiting us on Facebook (click here).
Yesterday’s AOTD was:
gauche : tactful :: titanic : Lilliputian
I think this is a great example of why students need to understand literary references and how they make their way into our vocabulary. In case you’re mystified by “Lilliputian”, it is a reference to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Gulliver is washed ashore after a shipwreck and finds himself a prisoner of a race of tiny people, less than 6 inches tall, who are inhabitants of the island country of Lilliput. “Lilliputian” can be used as a noun to name a native of Lilliput, or more commonly, as an adjective meaning trivial or extremely small.
Even if your students haven’t read Gulliver’s Travels, it is important that they recognize and understand the literary reference of “Lilliputian.” When asked why they looked this word up on Merriam-Webster’s website (www.m-w.com), respondents answered “Crossword puzzle” and “GRE vocab word.” (By the way, Gulliver’s Travels is available as a free download through www.planetebook.com and other websites!)
At each grade level, the competition consists of three 20-minute analogy-solving meets, which are held at your school three times during the academic year (December, February and April).
Prior to each meet, students are given a list of 25 challenging vocabulary words, which are customized for each competition level that will appear in the meet analogies. Excellence in the competition will require both a mastery of the word meanings and thoughtful reasoning about the relationships between the word list vocabulary and more familiar language used in the competition’s analogies.
Try one for yourself from our sixth grade blue division:
GARB : REPAST :: ___________ : ___________
(a) WEAR : STIR
(b) CLOTHES : COOK
(c) EAT : WEAR
(d) THIN : FAT
(e) SEW : COOK
We hope you learned a new word, or maybe a new usage for a word you already knew, as you thought your way through the choices. If you're curious, option e was the correct answer.
After last week’s blog about POLTROONERY, I started thinking about how much fun it is to learn about the origin of words, and how that knowledge can really help you remember the meaning and usage of a word. I was perusing a book I purchased last year called Grammar Girl’s 101 Words to Sound Smart by Mignon Fogarty, and came across this entry for SARDONIC (a WordMasters word in 1991 and 2009):
Greeks coined the word sardonic from the name of the island Sardinia (now part of Italy), where a plant was said to grow that, if eaten, would force face muscles into a grimacing smile—not a smile of happiness, but a smile of pain—a sardonic smile. Scientists in Italy recently reported that they believe a Sardinian plant called water celery is the lethal herb the Greeks had in mind.
Sardonic means cutting, cynical, and disdainful and is often used to describe a kind of humor.
Now try to solve this WordMasters Challenge from our analogy archives:
COMMENT : SARDONIC :: __________________________
One of the best parts of running the WordMasters Challenge is that I am constantly learning new words myself. Several months ago, the Analogy of the Day (follow us on Twitter now to start receiving the AOTD!) read as follows:
FANATIC : ZEALOT :: QUISLING : ___________
Hmmm….Fanatic…check. Zealot…check. Quisling…quisling? Poltroon?? So I did what any true WordMaster would do and I looked up the definitions. A quisling is a traitor who collaborates with an enemy force occupying their country. The word was coined during the Nazi occupation of Norway in World War II when Major Vidkun Quisling, serving as Minister-President, backed Germany’s Final Solution. After the war, Quisling was found guilty of murder and high treason, and was executed by firing squad in 1945. The word quisling became synonymous with traitor. Okay, so now you’ll never forget what a quisling is, right?
But I wasn’t done researching. I also learned that a poltroon is an utter coward. The term dates back to the 16th century, and is likely derived from Old French poultron or Old Italian poltrone meaning lazy or good-for-nothing. Okay, not quite as memorable as the quisling story, I admit. However, one dictionary website suggested linking poltroon with poultry, and remembering that a coward is just a big chicken.
So this summer, I have been reading Ken Follett’s Fall of Giants, which is chock full of historical references to European politics during World War I. I came across the following passage, which contains actual excerpts from a speech delivered by David Lloyd George to the British House of Commons in 1916 upon becoming Prime Minister:
“Any man or set of men who wantonly, or without sufficient cause, prolonged a terrible conflict like this would have on his soul a crime that oceans could not cleanse.”
That was a biblical touch, Ethel thought, a Baptist-chapel reference to sins being washed away.
But then, like a preacher, he made the contrary statement. “Any man or set of men who, out of a sense of weariness or despair, abandoned the struggle without the high purpose for which we had entered into it being nearly fulfilled, would have been guilty of the costliest act of poltroonery ever perpetrated by any statesman.”
Poltroonery! I experienced the thrill our students enjoy when they encounter a WordMasters word in literature or the media. Now I’m just waiting for the perfect opportunity to work quisling or poltroon into conversation….
Have you come across any WordMasters words in your summer reading?
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