Four students representing Long Beach LARC have received perfect scores in meets for this year’s WordMasters Challenge™—a national vocabulary competition involving nearly 150,000 students annually. Three earned this achievement in the third meet, while one did so in the second.

For meet three, fourth-graders Julia DiGiorgio and Kailyn Kelly are among 111 perfect scorers out of 3,000 contenders for their grade level, while third-grader Caley O'Brien is one of only 46 perfect scorers out of about 2,750 participants in her age group. Ronin Morita is among 58 out of 1,200 third-graders to receive a perfect score in meet two. LARC teachers Dr. Caitlin King and Mr. Justin Sulsky coached the students in preparation for the meet. 

Other students earning outstanding scores in meets two and three are third-graders Jordi Perez, Kate Ragona and Aaliyah Trichter and fourth-graders LiLin Garfinkel, Catherine Maguire, Marissa Miller, Luke Morita, Geddy Moss and Lucia Petty.

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.