FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 2022
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 third grade team scored an impressive 189 points out of a possible 200 in the first of three meets this year, placing second in the nation. In addition, the eighth grade team scored 192 points to finish sixth nationwide, and the fifth grade team earned a ninth place finish with 176 points.
Competing in the difficult Blue Division of the WordMasters Challenge™, third graders Noah Urman and Mark Vaks, seventh grader Stella Myagkaya, and eighth graders Gabriel Donde, Ariella Khochinsky and Fiona Sirotin each earned a perfect score of 20 on the challenge. Nationally, only 26 third graders, 72 seventh graders, and 51 eighth graders achieved this result. Other students from Big Apple Academy who achieved outstanding results in the meet include: third graders Alexandra Balyasniy, Alexander Fayerman, Alsu Gyurdzhyan, Elizabeth Telnov and Leon Trif; fifth grader Brooke Goldman; sixth grader Richard Kostenuk; seventh graders Isabella Gianfrancesco, Eitan Kanayev, Daniel Lerner, Eva Litovsky, Sasha Pisarevsky and Rachel Stern; and eighth graders Isabella Chernobelsky, Kamila Filshtinskiy, Veronika Gulko, Samuel Isakov, Sofia Kuptsova and Lauren Zagarov. The students were coached in preparation for the WordMasters Challenge™ by Sharon Gintzler, Enza DiFilipi, Dina Kuzminer, Gena Rozhdestvenksiy, Olga Strausov. Congratulations to all!
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.
