Several students 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, fourth graders Jordi Perez and Ronin Morita and fifth graders Eva Gargiulo and Kailyn Kelly each earned a perfect score of 20 on one of the challenges. Nationally, only 3% of fourth graders and 9% of fifth graders taking the meet achieved this result. Other students from Long Beach LARC who achieved outstanding results in the meets include third graders Hudson Christine and Tyce Laros; fourth graders Ian Olivo, Ariana Lye, Andrew Doyle, Caley O’Brien, Kate Ragona, Jordan Soriano; and fifth graders Elliot Biern, Lilin Garfinkel, Shane Haglich, Jordan Haltrecht, Winter Collinson, Marissa Miller, Brooke Nielson, Lucia Petty, Sienna Warren, Sydney Brandt, Catherine Maguire, Geddy Moss, Julia DiGiorgio, Luke Morita, and Nina Rugolsky.

The students were coached in preparation for the WordMasters Challenge™ 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.