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academic competitions<br />
Worlds of Words: Competitive SCRABBLE ®<br />
Are you the kind<br />
of kid who<br />
anagrams street<br />
signs? Do you see a<br />
stop sign and think to<br />
yourself, “Pots, tops,<br />
spot…?” Is your favorite<br />
part of the newspaper<br />
the Jumbles or the<br />
crossword puzzle? If so,<br />
competitive SCRABBLE<br />
might be calling out your<br />
name! If your school<br />
doesn’t already have a<br />
Eliza and Hannah<br />
SCRABBLE club, ask a<br />
teacher or parent to help<br />
you start one—you won’t regret it! Our SCRABBLE<br />
club competed together as a mixed-grade team<br />
at the National School Scrabble Competition in<br />
Orlando, Florida along with 100 other teams from<br />
across the United States. We made new friends,<br />
got all sorts of great prizes, and learned a bunch of<br />
new words.<br />
ELIZA: My first year of SCRABBLE competition<br />
was as a fifth grader. I paired with Hannah and we<br />
were the only team to beat the Windham Whiptails,<br />
the team from New Hampshire that won the entire<br />
competition and $10,000! Jimmy Kimmel even<br />
mentioned us on his show—my friends all thought<br />
that was really cool.<br />
HANNAH: Our school club meets once each week<br />
for an hour before school. We play games and<br />
learn new words and tricks for memorizing words<br />
(we’re supposed to write them in our SCRABBLE<br />
journals, but I always forget mine). My mom is<br />
the coach and she brings in doughnuts whenever<br />
anyone beats her… that means she brings in<br />
doughnuts a lot!<br />
HANNAH: I first started playing SCRABBLE as a<br />
fifth grader when I teamed up with my older brother<br />
for the National School SCRABBLE Championship<br />
in Providence, Rhode Island. We won a prize for<br />
the highest scoring game—689 points!—and I was<br />
hooked! I didn’t even know my two-letter words at<br />
first, but now I know them all—from aa (volcanic<br />
ash) to za (pizza)—and so many more, like<br />
mbaqanga (an African dance) and zoeae (a larval<br />
form of certain crustaceans).<br />
Do you want to expand your vocabulary?<br />
Duke TIP’s Independent Learning unit, Word Power,<br />
focuses on the Latin and Greek prefixes, roots, and suffixes<br />
upon which much of the English language is based. Read<br />
more at www.tip.duke.edu/learn.<br />
This book is written by Hannah’s<br />
and Eliza’s mom, Katya Lezin, and<br />
centers around some teens who join<br />
the school’s SCRABBLE Club<br />
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