MARQUETTE - Bothwell Middle School eighth-grader Corey Miles recently won highest honors in this year's WordMasters Challenge.

A national language arts competition entered by about 230,000 students annually, the challenge consists of three separate meets held during the school year.

Competing in the difficult Blue Division of the challenge, Miles earned a perfect score in this year's first meet, held in December. In the entire country, only 72 eighth-graders achieved perfect results.

Other students at Bothwell who earned outstanding results in the meet included eighth-graders Zach Johnson and Alexander Shahbazi. The school's students were coached by Paula Diedrich.

The WordMasters Challenge is an exercise in critical thinking that first encourages students to become familiar with a set of interesting new words that are considerably harder than grade level, and then challenges them to use those words to complete analogies expressing various kinds of logical relationships. Working to solve the challenge analogies helps students learn to think both analytically and metaphorically.