Two students representing Long Beach LARC have received perfect scores in the first of three meets for this year’s WordMasters Challenge™—a national vocabulary competition involving nearly 150,000 students annually.

Fifth-grader Hunter Stadtman and fourth-grader Ronin Rugolsky each earned perfect scores of 20 in the recent meet. Only 52 fifth-graders and 12 fourth-graders achieved these results out of over 12,000 students across the nation.

Long Beach LARC fifth-graders Michael Rossi, Gabriel Klarikaitis and Dean Parenti and third-graders Luke Morita and Catherine Maguire also received outstanding results in the first meet. The students were coached 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.  

LARC, which stands for Learning Activities to Raise Creativity, is the district’s gifted and talented program that focuses on goals related to critical thinking, problem solving, creativity and group process. Students are taught based on inquiry and essential questions, and participate in a number of competitions and events such as the WordMasters challenge each year.