A student representing Long Beach LARC received a perfect score in one of the challenge meets in this year’s WordMasters Challenge™—a national vocabulary competition involving nearly 150,000 students annually.

Competing in the very difficult Gold Division of the WordMasters Challenge™, fourth grader Sara Wisniewski earned a perfect score of 20 on one of the challenges. Nationally, only 4% of fourth graders taking the meet achieved this result.

WordMasters consists of three different meets, and WordMasters recognizes the top 2% of cumulative scorers in their grade level as High Honor recipients. The following students earned that impressive distinction: Ellie Donahue, Sara Wisniewski, Hudson Christine, and Shayna Tozer.

Other students from Long Beach LARC who achieved nationally recognized results in the meets are 3rd grader Rylee Solash; 4th graders Nate Blau, Daniel Moreira, Georgia Rector, Ava Shammas, Ellie Donahue, Jada Marino, Kylie Gorman, Maximo Vitolo, and Sara Wisniewski; and 5th graders Hudson Christine, Samantha Penello, and Shayna Tozer.

The students were coached in preparation for the WordMasters Challenge™ by Dr. Caitlin Fuentes King and Dr. 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.