Garden City High School freshmen Anna Reilly and Kimberly Lloret recently won honors in the WordWright Challenge, a national English competition that tests students’ reading comprehension and analysis of texts that range from “short fiction by Eudora Welty or John Updike to poetry as old as Shakespeare’s or as recent as Margaret Atword’s, and to essays as classic as E.B. White’s or as current as a Time Magazine essay by James Poniewozik,” stated a release from WordWright. “We used this program to increase students’ attention to close reading and analysis of a work,” explained English teacher Catherine Oriani.
The two students earned near-perfect scores, placing them among the highest 200 ninth-graders in the country. “I like writing fictional stories in the mystery and horror genre,” explained Lloret. She attributes her love of reading and writing to her middle school English teacher Elaine Feerick. Reilly shared a similar interest in reading and writing fiction, indicating that Laura Connolly, her fifth grade teacher at Stratford who required “an essay or poem every week,” had a tremendous impact on her continued interest.
– Submitted by Garden City Public Schools
