Long Beach Wordsmiths Hit High Score In Nationwide Exam

LONG BEACH, NY. — Long Beach fifth graders Jiya Klarner and August Rodabaugh are among the top 35 fifth grade students in the country after earning perfect scores on the WordMasters Challenge, a critical thinking and verbal reasoning competition with participants across the country.

The WordMasters challenge, district officials said, “encourages students to become familiar with a set of new words and use them to complete analogies and logical relationships. Solving these challenges helps students learn to think both analytically and metaphorically.”

For Klarner and Rodabaugh, the 20-out-of-20 score put them in a class with 33 other students who participated in the nationwide exam, out of a pool of 125,000. The duo are participants in the district’s “Learning Activities to Raise Creativity” program, abbreviated as LARC. They were joined by fellow LARCers Max April, Blythe Aull, Dylan Davies, Declan Garvey, Tyler Gorman, Charles
Johnston, Rafe Kaminsky, Beckett McCaffrey-Ricardo and Ryan McMahon, who also scored in the top five percent of WordMasters participants.

“LARC (Learning Activities to Raise Creativity) Program is our ‘gifted and talented’ program for select district-wide students in grades three through five,” East Elementary’s principal page reads. “LARC students are engaged in an environment which focuses on critical thinking, problem solving and collaboration.”

District officials said the WordMasters Challenge participants have two more “meets” this year, giving them further chances to flex their language arts skills with their peers.