Bowling Green City School District’s Gifted Intervention Specialist Laura Weaver recently recognized her students’ achievements in math during a BG Board of Education meeting.
Each year, one of the most challenging assignments in BG’s gifted services program, also known as PACE, is the Perennial Math competition. This year’s classes participated in the first competition season, which runs from November – February.
To prepare for the competition tests the students do weekly practice quizzes from previous competitions, a variety of other math challenges such as the Daily Number Study which takes a number and breaks it down with prime factorization, multiples, and the order of operations to quickly solve advanced logic problems on the tests. They also participate in a program called MASHUP MATH where students have to cognitively decipher the value of objects using the order of operations to find the hidden value of a number.
Perennial Math is a competition program which offers accelerated LOGIC math problems to students with a variety of math skills and abilities. Each year, Weaver sad she is challenged when coaching these students for their season because their mathematical skills are widely varied.
One common characteristic among gifted students, however, is their ability to use advanced cognitive skills to approach and solve problems logically. Many of these students have developed unique strategies for interpreting and deciphering mathematical word problems, often arriving at solutions in ways that differ from conventional methods.
Students compete for team and individual points by taking one test each month in their respective team. Each test consists of six questions and students have 30 – 50 minutes to complete the test.
The three teams are Rookie (3/4 grade) Intermediate (5/6 grade) and Advanced (7/8 grade). Students cannot compete on a team that is more than two grade levels higher than their current grade, which usually eliminates some of our outstanding mathletes in 3rd and 4th grade as some of these mathletes are capable of advanced courses in middle and high school math.
Dr. Sylvia Dean, Perennial Math Director of Huntsville, Alabama, created the program to offer students more venues to showcase their talents and to help teachers provide enrichment of math skills in their classroom.
BGCS has been competing in this competition since 2013 and PACE students have won team plaques and gold medals with perfect scores for 13 consecutive years.
According to Dean, this year there were 2,297 students competing nationally with 145 teams participating in grades 3-8.
At the end of the monthly competition seasons, teams and individual students whose scores ranked among the highest in the nation, were invited to participate in the National Championship live tournaments in May. Our Rookie and Intermediate teams were invited to participate in the team competition along with five third graders, 10 fourth graders, and seven fifth graders who were invited for the individual competition.
In PACE, every competitor receives a certificate of participation. Every team awards the gold medal to its top competitor. Medals are awarded based on the highest score out of the four tests of the season. A perfect score is 24 points.
Gold Medalists receive a math champion T-shirt and a gold medal for having the top score on the team in their grade level for that team. Students who receive dogtags are in the top 10% of students participating in that competition level at their grade level.
Here is the breakdown of winners this year:
Rookie team achievements: For the team plaques this year, Rookie teams needed a compiled score of 184. BG’s mathletes in third and fourth grade had a score of 228, which was also the highest team score out of all 69 Rookie teams and 1,170 students participating at this level. Nationally, 14 third grade students had a perfect score of 24 and three of those students were from BG.
Intermediate team achievements: For the team plaque, Intermediate teams needed a score of 176 and the BG team had a score of 209. Nationally, 11 students had perfect scores. Two of those students were gold medalists from Bowling Green City Schools.
Finally, in Advance team achievements: This team is the most difficult for students because it challenges the logic of math at an accelerated 7th and 8th grade level for our 5th graders. BG had a smaller team this year which limited a higher team score of 151 for a plaque. In addition, snow days impacted test time because they just happened to fall on PACE days. However, the team of six students scored 46 points on the only two tests they completed. Nationally, there were only four students in the 8th grade with perfect scores. Nathan Lawarre was the only student to have a perfect score on the two tests the BG students were able to take.
“These students excel across the curriculum, and I am confident that we will continue to see them achieve many more accomplishments and receive well-deserved recognition as they progress through their secondary education,” Weaver said.
This year’s gold medalists for Perennial Math included Declan Koontz, Joey Budke, Oliver Schetter – these students were recently recognized for their perfect score on the math 4 OST along with Jamie Wolfinger – who had a perfect score on the math 3 OST.
Nathan LaWarre is a gold medalist for the intermediate and advanced teams and Rano Rakhimova is a gold medalist for the intermediate team. Rano was recently recognized for her perfect score on the OST math 6 test as a 5th grader, and a perfect score on the OST 5th grade ELA test. She also had a perfect score on last year’s ELA test.
Weaver also announced that Rano was selected to speak at next month’s Ohio Association for Gifted Children’s Fall Conference in Columbus. She is the first student selected to speak at one of the main session days, where she will present her PACE research study about gifted and talented student programs as seen through the eyes of a gifted student. The annual three-day conference will be attended by hundreds of educators, gifted coordinators, intervention specialists, psychologists, and administrators at Ohio’s primary statewide gifted education event.
