Bowditch Students Win Second Place in National Competition

Students from ranked highly in a national language arts competition, according to the San Mateo-Foster City School District.

Entered by roughly 220,000 students every year, WordMasters Challenge consists of three separate meets held at intervals during the school year.

Bowditch's sixth grade team tied for second place out of 403 school teams in this year’s first meet. They were coached by Bowditch Middle teachers Maggie Markham, Debbie Freesmeier, Lisa Bravo and Amelia Hollingsworth in the difficult Blue Division Challenge.

Bowditch's seventh graders, coached by Tyler Webb, placed fifth out of 294 teams.

"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," said Coordinator of Community Services Amber Farinha. "Working to solve the challenge analogies helps students learn to think both analytically and metaphorically."

The students will participate in two more meets during the coming months. Medals and certificates will be awarded in June.

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