FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
JANUARY 2020
 

Several teams representing Big Apple Academy achieved Highest Honors in the recent WordMasters Challenge™—a national vocabulary competition involving nearly 125,000 students annually. The eighth grade team scored an impressive 181 points out of a possible 200 in the first of three meets this year, placing sixth in the nation. In addition, the fifth and seventh grade team scored 189 and 173 points respectively, each earning a seventh place finish in the nation.

Competing in the difficult Blue Division of the WordMasters Challenge™, fifth graders Isabella Gianfrancesco, Aiden Sanders and Emma Smolitsky each earned a perfect score of 20 on the challenge. Nationally, only 83 fifth graders achieved this result. Other students from Big Apple Academy who achieved outstanding results in the meet include third grader Theodore Pimanoff, fourth grader Tigran Khandkar, fifth graders Kate Charach, Rafaella Krasnik, Sam Linetsky and Rachel Stern, seventh grader Julian Laznik, and eighth graders Dinah-Luba Beylison, Eva Blyakherov, Milana Kravets and Daniel Potievsky. The students were coached in preparation for the WordMasters Challenge™ by [Mr. Gena Rozhdestvenskiy, Mr. Mark Silverberg, Ms. Inga Barbarash, Ms. Katherine Angelucci.

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.

Congratulations to all!