Long Beach Learning Activities to Raise Creativity (LARC) fifth graders Maven Aull, Kylie Gorman and Sara Wisniewski earned a perfect score of 20 on one of the challenges competing in this year’s Gold Division of the WordMasters Challenge, a national vocabulary competition involving nearly 150,000 students annually. Nationally, only 4% of fifth graders participating in the challenge 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.

Earning impressive distinction for their participation were: Adrian Celis, Kylie Gorman and Sara Wisniewski. Other Long Beach LARC students who achieved nationally recognized results in the meets are third graders Paxton Cavallo, Diane Seman and Andrew Voege. Fourth graders recognized were Katrina Casey, Anaya Crystal, Josephine DiMartino, Cody O’Connell, Ella Pedersen, Sophie Rusgo and Gabriella Zwart. Fifth graders recognized were Nate Blau, Gavin Carns, Adrian Celis, Isabella Corritore, Harley Eidens, Kylie Gorman, Theo Haltrecht. Jackson Kessler, Travis Malone, Daniel Moreira Georgia Rector, Noah Rossi, Ava Shammas, Sara Wisniewski, Sutter Yanowitch, and Viktor Zolley.

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.

Date Added: 5/27/2022