Fifth grade students from Long Beach Learning Activities to Raise Creativity (LARC) delivered an outstanding performance in the first of three meets in this year’s WordMasters Challenge™, with multiple students scoring in the top 5% nationally and two earning perfect scores in the highly competitive Gold Division. Fifth graders Jiya Klarner and August Rodabaugh achieved perfect scores of 20, a rare distinction earned by only 35 fifth-grade students nationwide. Their achievement highlights both exceptional vocabulary mastery and advanced critical-thinking skills.

Additionally, to the perfect scores, several other fifth graders placed in the top 5% of scores nationally, including Max April, Blythe Aull, Dylan Davies, Declan Garvey, Tyler Gorman, Charles Johnston, Rafe Kaminsky, Beckett McCaffrey-Ricardo and Ryan McMahon.

The WordMasters Challenge™ is a nationally recognized competition that emphasizes critical thinking and verbal reasoning. The WordMasters Challenge™ encourages students to become familiar with a set of interesting new words 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. With two more meets remaining this year, Long Beach LARC students have set an impressive standard of excellence and look forward to continued success in the WordMasters Challenge™.