REACH Program Builds Perennial WordMasters

Many a student has spent hours struggling to master the dreaded analogy sections that repeatedly appear on standardized tests from elementary through graduate school.

If only they’d known the key to success was as simple as asking for help from a Fair Lawn fifth grader.

In what’s become a yearly occurrence, a team of fifth grade students from Fair Lawn’s REACH program achieved impressive results in their first meet of the annual WordMasters Challenge, a national analogy competition.

In this December’s meet, the team took sixth out of 706 school teams competing at the fifth grade level nationwide.

Fair Lawn students Christian Barrientos, Andre Dulaj and Octavia Feliciano earned three of the only 130 perfect scores in the entire country, which puts them in the top 0.3 percent of the 37,450 fifth graders who took the test.

WordMasters participants are given word lists to study and then administered three timed 20-question analogy tests at different intervals throughout the year. Each school, based on its top 10 students’ scores, is given a cumulative ranking at the end. 

Last year’s crop of fifth grade WordMasters finished seventh in the nation. The year before that, it was fourth, REACH teacher Dale Cohen said.

REACH affords gifted and talented fourth and fifth grade students the opportunity to participate in various out-of-classroom enrichment work during the year.  Cohen, Sophia Bukis and Andrea Anzaldo are the district’s REACH teachers who rotate from school to school each week and train the young WordMasters.

“We all believe in it and feel it’s so valuable,” Bukis said of learning how to solve analogies. “You see those things on tests from now until the end, so we just stress how it’s really very valuable and I think a lot of the parents who get their children involved in this feel it is as well.” 

WordMasters is one of REACH’s self-select offerings for fifth graders, which means it is open to all fifth grade students motivated enough to do the additional work, regardless of aptitude.

“They used to do it with just the selected students,” said Cohen, who has been teaching WordMasters in the district since 1992, “but we broadened it to include other students because we felt that that was a good opportunity.”

About 100 fifth graders district-wide participate, spending 45 minutes per week from November to the end of April meeting to practice their word knowledge through word games, word puzzles and conversing using words from the provided lists. 

“We try to get them excited about the vocabulary and about the words,” Cohen said. “And then try to use the strategies for how you have to do the puzzles." 

It’s stressing the strategies, and the instructors’ improved grasp of teaching the strategies that has bred so much success.

“It’s not just vocabulary,” Cohen said. “We really concentrate on the strategies of how to solve the analogy, how to think it through.”

“It’s truly problem solving,” Bukis added.

The district’s WordMasters are taking their second challenge of the year this week and have every reason to believe they'll repeat their success.

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Here's a list of the fifth grade WordMasters who scored outstanding, but not quite perfect scores on the first challenge of the year:

Jaclyn Burke, Daniel Chang, Maya Dobler, Veronica Elias, Anastasia Ivanov, Akshaya Jagadeesh, Neha Krishnaswamy, Denzel Mendez, Karina Nasretdinov, Tristan Romanov, Polina Shagin, Matthew Shinkar, Ronald Yusim, Alyssa Arlaus, Karen Broytman, Jordanna Cantin, Linit Freydenson, Sabina Kravchik, Rachel Lekht, Kira Meerholz, Dasha Perlov, Andrew Shamis, Vileen Singh, Nicholas Tamburo, Brendan Vann, Ariel Wilk, Eden Yosef, Jamie Yun Lee, Mark Spivak and Tina Zamaku