Divine Savior Academy (Doral) – Two students representing Divine Savior Academy recently won high honors in this year’s WordWright Challenge, a competition for American high school students requiring close reading and analysis of many different kinds of prose and poetry.
In the year’s third meet, held in February, junior Adriana Llano was one of only 15 eleventh graders in the entire country to earn a perfect score. Cristina Rodriguez earned distinguished results as well. More than 70,00 high school students from 48 states entered the meet. The school’s participation was overseen by Mr. Ryan Kirchoff, Director of Curriculum and Instruction. “To achieve an exemplary score on this WordWright is especially impressive. Students needed to read, analyze, and compare two different nonfiction texts. The skill of being able to understand the similarities and nuanced differences among multiple texts is definitely a college-applicable skill,” says Kirchoff.
The premise behind the WordWright Challenge is that attentive reading and sensitivity to language are among the most important skills students acquire in school. The texts for the third WordWright meet this year were an essay by Natalie Kusz for 9th and 10th graders and a pair of essays by Francine Prose and Colin Harrison for 11th and 12th graders. The students will participate in one more meet in the coming months, and medals and certificates will be awarded at the end of the school year to those who have achieved and/or improved the most in the course of the year.
