NEW YORK, May 6, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Throughout the
past seven months, 1.3 million students across North America competed on behalf of their
schools to master the most words in Vocabulary.com's 7th annual
Vocabulary Bowl. Students answered 450 million questions, mastered
a collective total of 36.6 million words, and expanded their
lexicons in the classroom and at home.
In a dazzling display of academic achievement, Etiwanda High School cemented its Vocabulary
Bowl legacy by becoming the competition's first five-time overall
champion, winning its titles consecutively since 2017. McKenzie
Middle School battled until the end in a remarkably close race and
was crowned the overall champion in the middle/elementary school
category for the first time. Each school will receive its Champions
Cup at a special ceremony, and all 50 U.S. state and 9 Canadian
provincial winners will be recognized for their Bowl achievements
with championship banners.
The Vocabulary Bowl is hosted by Vocabulary.com, the leading
destination for improving literacy through vocabulary building.
Erudite Etiwanda
Etiwanda High
School (EHS) is located in Rancho
Cucamonga, California, and enrolls 3,400 students. Etiwanda
is no stranger to Vocabulary Bowl record books: the school's
quintuple makes it the most decorated participant in Bowl history,
and it previously set the record for most words learned in a season
and most monthly wins overall (51). EHS kept pace with previous
years by mastering an astonishing 335,569 words during the
2020-2021 season!
An extraordinary win calls for special recognition, so
Vocabulary.com created a new word to honor Etiwanda's fifth
straight victory: Quintarian. The word is a combination of
the Latin quintus, meaning "fifth," and the suffix
-arian, which forms nouns and adjectives concerned with a
specific concept. As a noun, quintarian signifies a person, school,
or team that wins a championship five times!
Volunteer state victory
McKenzie Middle School (MMS)
serves 370 students and is located in McKenize, Tennessee. McKenize's remarkable rise through
the leaderboards highlights the school's commitment to literacy.
Last year, the Rebels placed 80th in the middle/elementary
category. This season, McKenzie
triumphed in the middle/elementary school and Division III
categories, won the Tennessee
state title and mastered the third-most words (218,033) out of all
participants! McKenzie was in a
neck-and-neck race through the closing days of the Bowl, eventually
beating out a much larger rival school that had several times the
number of students!
Vocabulary Bowl division champions
During the
Vocabulary Bowl, schools also battle it out within one of three
divisions based on enrollment size. The division winners are:
- Divisions I: Winner—Etiwanda High School (Rancho Cucamonga, California); Runner
up—Walnut Hills High School (Cincinnati,
Ohio)
- Division II: Winner—Great Neck North Middle School
(Great Neck, New York); Runner
up—Pines Middle School (Pembroke Pines,
Florida)
- Division III: Winner—McKenzie Middle School
(McKenzie, Tennessee); Runner
up—Elise Buckingham Charter High School (Vacaville, California)
"It's an honor to recognize the winners and participants of this
year's thrilling competition," said Kristin
Eckhardt, Senior Marketing Manager at Vocabulary.com. "We
are inspired by the collective accomplishments of the schools and
students that demonstrated their unquenchable thirst for building
literacy skills and developing a love of language."
"At the beginning of this year's Bowl, our teachers and students
set a goal to be national champions," said Cassie Ellis, 8th-grade English language arts
teacher at McKenzie Middle School. "We proved what Mark Twain
stated, 'It's not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of
the fight in the dog,' by surpassing schools five times our size.
We are extremely proud of our faculty and students for rising to
the occasion to represent the community of McKenzie, Tennessee!"
Fast Facts about the 2020-2021 Vocabulary Bowl:
- Total students participating: 1,300,000+ million
students
- Total schools participating: 43,500+
- Total words mastered: 36,600,000+
- K-12 students from 50 U.S. states, U.S. territories and 9
Canadian provinces participated
- Students earn points for their school by mastering words on
Vocabulary.com
- See the full results of this season's Vocabulary Bowl
here.
How schools use the Vocabulary Bowl to build
literacy
Vocabulary.com uses adaptive technology that
tailors literacy instruction to students' unique needs. The
Vocabulary Bowl gives educators a fun opportunity to further
personalize instruction, boost literacy skills and inject
competitive spirit into education. Teachers have used the Bowl to
gamify learning by giving extra credit to classroom point leaders
every week, presenting monthly awards to students who master the
most words and posting results in parent newsletters to share their
learners' successes!
About Vocabulary.com
Founded in 2010, Vocabulary.com
provides students with a dynamic and personalized environment to
grow their vocabulary. With a dictionary that teaches over 15,000
words, Vocabulary.com makes learning and discovering new words fun
with entertaining definitions and real-world examples sourced from
literature and journalism. Adaptive, individualized and
interactive, the platform seamlessly integrates with any school
curriculum, helping students master the academic vocabulary they'll
encounter in literature, textbooks and standardized tests. To date,
nearly 4 million learners in 56,000 schools around the world have
answered more than 5 billion questions on Vocabulary.com.
Vocabulary.com joined the IXL Learning family in 2020.
Press Contact
Eric
Bates
IXL Learning
press@ixl.com
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SOURCE IXL Learning