Frances McDonough, the language arts specialist at Village School, brought the Reader’s Digest National Word Power Grade-Level Challenge to the school. The school champions include grade four co-winners Will Davis and Michael Byrnes, grade five winner Joey Donoghue, and grade five runner-up Alexander Clifton.##M:[more]##
All of the classroom winners were commended on their achievement. The grade four classroom champions included Paul Phalen, Ashlyn Lackey, Alicia Traub, Sam Engel, Maggie Walsh, Sarah Kuzy, Nick Meduski, Adeet Phanse, Morven Chin, Elizabeth Bellotti, Daniel Wang, Will Davis, Arnav Sood, Michael Byrnes, and Andrew Cortez.
Grade 5 classroom champions included Michael Egan, Rohit Tallapragada, Yun-Ah Park, Hannah Chen, Jackie Litwin, Shivani Badgi, Ayza Akhtar, Brendan Nuse, Alexander Clifton, Rishya Narayanan, Joey Donoghue, Naveen Raghuraman, Amani Saeed, and Cassie Perez.
Last year’s national winner, Ming-Ming Tran, a student at Grover Middle School, was first-place state winner in the NJ State Readers Digest Word Challenge Competition and traveled to Orlando, Florida, to compete in the national competition. She took first place in the third annual National Word Power Challenge and earned a $25,”000 college scholarship.