Young math wizards from Bowling Green City Schools were recognized last week during the monthly meeting of the Board of Education.
Laura Weaver, the district’s coordinator for gifted services and gifted intervention specialist for grades 3-5, reported on the success of the students achieving Perennial Math Awards.
Each year, one of the most challenging assignments in PACE is the Perennial Math competition and monthly tests. This year’s classes participated in the second season, which runs from January through April.
This year’s gold medalists for Perennial Math are Aiden Xu with two gold medals, Gabe Lust, Mazie Perkins, Ruby Underwood, Silas Kieffer-Airhart and Jessa Donaldson.
“All of these students are amazing students across the curriculum, and I know you will see more honors for them as they progress through their secondary education careers,” Weaver said to the school board.
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 be able to quickly solve advanced logic problems on the tests.
The students also do 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 all math skills and abilities. Students participate for team points and individual points by taking one test each month which consists of six questions.
The three teams are Rookie (third and fourth grades), Intermediate (fifth and sixth grades) and Advanced (seventh and eighth grades). Students cannot compete on a team that is more than two grade levels higher than their current grade, which usually eliminates some outstanding “mathletes” in third and fourth grade, who are advanced in middle school and high school math.
“PACE students started competing in this program in 2013, and I am proud to tell you we have won team plaques and had gold medalists with perfect scores every year since we began competing,” Weaver said.
This year there were 2,695 students competing internationally with 174 teams participating in third through eighth grades. Each student receives a certificate of participation and each 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. The perfect score is 24 points.
Gold Medalists receive a T-shirt and a gold medal for having the top score on the team and in their grade level for that team. Students who receive dog tags are in the top 10% of those participating in that competition level at their grade level.
Rookie Team: For the team plaques, Rookie teams needed a team score of 198 and the BG team scored 213, which was also the highest team score out of all the teams participating. Only nine students had a perfect score of 24 and two of those are gold medalist students from PACE – Ruby Underwood and Silas Kieffer-Airhart, fourth graders last year. The third Rookie gold medalist was Jessa Donaldson, from third grade last year.
Intermediate Team: For a team plaque, Intermediate teams had to have a team score of 157, and BG had a team score of 207, which was also the highest team score of all the teams participating. There were two students on the Intermediate team with perfect scores, and both of those were gold medalist students from PACE – Aiden Xu and Mazie Perkins, fourth graders last year. In addition, BG had the only gold medalist to score a perfect score from the fifth grade – Gabe Lust, who has been a gold medalist since third grade, started taking MS math in fourth grade and is taking Algebra 1 as a sixth grader this year. Weaver described him as a “truly gifted mathematician.”
Advanced Team: This team is the most difficult for most students as it truly challenges the logics of math at an accelerated seventh and eighth grade level. The Advanced team needed a team score of 138, and only one fifth grade team in the division had a perfect 138 – Bowling Green. The PACE team of fifth graders took this honor out of all teams participating.
