FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 2018

Two teams representing Big Apple Academy achieved Highest Honors in the recent WordMasters Challenge™—a national vocabulary competition involving nearly 150,000 students annually. The seventh grade team scored an impressive 190 points out of a possible 200 in the first of three meets this year, placing first in the nation. In addition, the eighth grade team scored 175 points out of 200 on the first meet, placing tenth in the nation.

Competing in the difficult Blue Division of the WordMasters Challenge™, seventh grader Ariel Farberov and Azamat Kutlukov each earned a perfect score of 20 on the challenge. Nationally, only 9 seventh graders achieved this result. Other students from Big Apple Academy who achieved outstanding results in the meet include fourth grader Elijah Raykhman, seventh graders Alyssa Cohen, Andrew Gershan, Mark Kirman, Artem Kofman, Julia Petrikovsky and Nikita Safronov, and eighth graders Ariel Grinshpoon and Edward Kemelmakher.The students were coached in preparation for the WordMasters Challenge™ by Gena Rozhdestvenksiy, Dina Kuzminer, and Erica Lemma.

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.  Although most vocabulary enrichment and analogy-solving programs are designed for use by high school students, WordMasters Challenge™ materials have been specifically created for younger students in grades three through eight.  They are particularly well suited for children who are motivated by the challenge of learning new words and enjoy the logical puzzles posed by analogies.