THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, June 17, 1996 TAG: 9606170081
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ALETA PAYNE, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: 51 lines
For the second year in a row, a team of students at Old Donation Center has won top national honors in the WordMasters Challenge.
The victory could teach the students the meaning of words such as perseverance and diligence, although this particular group of fifth-graders probably already knows those definitions.
WordMasters is a written examination that challenges students to learn difficult words. But the fun doesn't stop there. They must use the words in analogies, choosing the best fit from several possibilities.
For instance, ``full is to glutted as leisurely is to. . . '' The correct answer - chosen from a list that includes brusque, meandering, brisk and overt - is sluggish.
``We were really very surprised'' by the overall victory, fifth-grade teacher Faye Walker said. ``I think we really only won it by an edge.''
When the school was notified in April that the team had come in first nationally in the second of the three rounds of competition, teachers and students were thrilled but said it was unlikely they could win the entire competition because of a seventh-place finish in the previous round.
The ODC students surged ahead, however, to come in first in the nation by a couple of points. Another team of fifth-graders from ODC won last year.
More than 175,000 students compete in WordMasters each academic year. The tests are taken at the schools and sent in to the national competition. The top scores in each school on the 20-question test are counted toward each round's winners. In the final round, 26 fifth-graders nationwide earned perfect scores. Three of them attend ODC.
Walker admitted with a laugh that her best score is a 19.
The idea behind the competition isn't just for kids to learn nifty new words. It's also to build critical and logical thinking skills, to help students see the relationships between words and to build confidence, according to teacher Terri Dannemann.
The ODC students practice at school and home to prepare. ``We play charades, we put them in pairs and they role-play the words,'' said Walker.
The students also play a variety of vocabulary-building games and draw complicated, spider-like diagrams that analyze different forms of words, their origins and definitions.
Old Donation Center serves 1,900 of the city's gifted and talented students in second through eighth grades.
The young people attend classes at both their home school and the center.
ODC and Fairfield Elementary student Dylan Goldblatt, who ranks among the top 20 fifth-graders nationwide with his total score of 58 of a possible 60 for all three rounds, said his mother and father help him study but couldn't really explain that special something that makes him a whiz.
``It just comes to me. You just try to find words to fit,'' he said Sunday. ``It's just fun.'' by CNB