Two teams representing Thomas Jefferson Elementary School achieved Highest Honors in the recent WordMasters Challenge — a national vocabulary competition involving nearly 150,000 students annually. The third grade team scored 174 points out of a possible 200 in the second of three meets this year, placing sixth in the nation. In addition, the fourth grade team scored 185 points, finishing tenth in the nation.

Competing in the Gold Division of the WordMasters Challenge, fourth graders Mercer Colby and Abby Fred each earned a perfect score of 20 on the challenge. Nationally, only 54 fourth graders achieved this result. Other students from Thomas Jefferson Elementary School/Falls Church who achieved outstanding results in the meet include fourth grader Lydia Sturgill.

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.