Long Beach LARC fourth-grade student Theodore Clancy recently earned a perfect score of 20 in the second meet for this year’s WordMasters Challenge™ — a national vocabulary competition that involves nearly 150,000 students annually.

Only 116 fourth-graders out of more than 6,000 across the nation achieved a perfect score.

Other students representing Long Beach LARC who achieved nationally recognized results on the second and third meets include fifth-graders Troy DeFrancesco, Francesca Papetti, Jason Rea, Michael Rossi and Kira Argiro; fourth-graders Riley Mascolo, Ronin Rugolsky, Zachary Scouten, Jack Broughton, Vincent Napolitano, Leofwin Muskin and Henry Donahue; and third-graders Luke Morita and Marissa Miller. The students were coached in preparation for the WordMasters Challenge™ by Dr. Caitlin King and Mr. Justin Sulsky.

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. Working to solve the analogies helps students learn to think both analytically and metaphorically.