A student representing Long Beach LARC recently received a perfect score in the first meet for this year’s WordMasters Challenge™ — a national vocabulary competition involving nearly 150,000 students annually.

Fourth-grader Catherine Maguire earned a perfect score of 20 on the meet. Only 95 fourth-graders achieved a perfect score out of more than 6,000 students nationally taking the fourth-grade meet in the Gold Division. 

Other students from Long Beach LARC who achieved nationally recognized results on the first meet include fifth-graders Addison Bradley, Shea O’Hara and Ronin Rugolsky, fourth-graders Geddy Moss, LiLin Garfinkel, Jordan Haltrecht, Luke Morita, Nina Rugolsky, Marissa Miller, Enshan Ramkissoon, Brooke Nielsen and Sienna Warren and third-grader Jordi Perez. Dr. Caitlin King and Mr. Justin Sulsky coached these students in preparation for the event.

The WordMasters Challenge™ is an exercise in critical thinking that first encourages students to become familiar with a set of vocabulary 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.