Welcome to our new web site!

To give our readers a chance to experience all that our new website has to offer, we have made all content freely avaiable, through October 1, 2018.

During this time, print and digital subscribers will not need to log in to view our stories or e-editions.

McKenzie Middle School Wins Seventh Annual Vocabulary Bowl

Posted

NEW YORK, New York (May 6) — Throughout the past seven months, 1.3 million students across North America competed on behalf of their schools to master the most words in Vocabulary.com’s 7th annual Vocabulary Bowl. Students answered 450 million questions, mastered a collective total of 36.6 million words, and expanded their lexicons in the classroom and at home.
McKenzie Middle School battled until the end in a remarkably close race and was crowned the overall champion in the middle/elementary school category for the first time. Each school will receive its Champions Cup at a special ceremony, and all 50 U.S. state and 9 Canadian provincial winners will be recognized for their Bowl achievements with championship banners.
The Vocabulary Bowl is hosted by Vocabulary.com, the leading destination for improving literacy through vocabulary building.
McKenzie Middle School (MMS) serves 370 students and is located in McKenize, Tennessee. McKenzie’s remarkable rise through the leaderboards highlights the school’s commitment to literacy. Last year, the Rebels placed 80th in the middle/elementary category. This season, McKenzie triumphed in the middle/elementary school and Division III categories, won the Tennessee state title and mastered the third-most words (218,033) out of all participants! McKenzie was in a neck-and-neck race through the closing days of the Bowl, eventually beating out a much larger rival school that had several times the number of students!
Vocabulary Bowl division champions
During the Vocabulary Bowl, schools also battle it out within one of three divisions based on enrollment size. The division winners are:
Divisions I: Winner—Etiwanda High School (Rancho Cucamonga, California); Runner up—Walnut Hills High School (Cincinnati, Ohio)
Division II: Winner—Great Neck North Middle School (Great Neck, New York); Runner up—Pines Middle School (Pembroke Pines, Florida)
Division III: Winner—McKenzie Middle School (McKenzie, Tennessee); Runner up—Elise Buckingham Charter High School (Vacaville, California)

“It’s an honor to recognize the winners and participants of this year’s thrilling competition,” said Kristin Eckhardt, Senior Marketing Manager at Vocabulary.com. “We are inspired by the collective accomplishments of the schools and students that demonstrated their unquenchable thirst for building literacy skills and developing a love of language.”
“At the beginning of this year’s Bowl, our teachers and students set a goal to be national champions,” said Cassie Ellis, 8th-grade English language arts teacher at McKenzie Middle School. “We proved what Mark Twain stated, ‘It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog,’ by surpassing schools five times our size. We are extremely proud of our faculty and students for rising to the occasion to represent the community of McKenzie, Tennessee!”
Fast Facts about the 2020-2021 Vocabulary Bowl:
Total students participating: 1,300,000+ million students
Total schools participating: 43,500+
Total words mastered: 36,600,000+
K-12 students from 50 U.S. states, U.S. territories and 9 Canadian provinces participated
About Vocabulary.com
Founded in 2010, Vocabulary.com provides students with a dynamic and personalized environment to grow their vocabulary. With a dictionary that teaches over 15,000 words, Vocabulary.com makes learning and discovering new words fun with entertaining definitions and real-world examples sourced from literature and journalism. Adaptive, individualized and interactive, the platform seamlessly integrates with any school curriculum, helping students master the academic vocabulary they’ll encounter in literature, textbooks and standardized tests. To date, nearly 4 million learners in 56,000 schools around the world have answered more than 5 billion questions on Vocabulary.com. Vocabulary.com joined the IXL Learning family in 2020.