Students awarded for work

It sounds like a teacher’s dream.

After Nancy Urricariet’s students got done competing in an “academic pentathlon,” they had a curious reaction.

“They would come up to me after they had completed a section of the pentathlon, and say, ‘We just took a test. It was really fun,’ ” Urricariet said. “They all have such positive attitudes.”

The Lincoln Elementary sixth-graders won first prize in Orange County’s 24th annual Academic Pentathlon, and they did it with hard work and sacrifice.

“The kids gave up their lunches for four months to learn this stuff,” Lincoln Elementary teacher Judy Taylor said. “They volunteered to be a part of it and did extra homework to practice for the competition.”

The competition tests students individually and in teams on essay writing, language and literature, math, social science and science.

There were 51 schools and 73 teams that participated May 10 at Katella High School in Anaheim, said Kristin Rigby, project manager for the Orange County Department of Education.

“Each school is put into one of five divisions and schools compete against others from their same division,” she said. “The cool thing is that each school is divided into teams, and those teams must include a variety of A-students, B-students and C-students.”

Once individual testing is completed, all contestants meet in the gym to take part in a “super quiz,” Taylor said. Students are asked a series of questions during the super quiz, a team event, and are allotted 30 seconds to come up with each answer.

Lincoln Elementary students received awards for their efforts Thursday evening at the Heritage Forum in Anaheim. The two teams representing the Corona del Mar school in the competition took first and fourth places for the highest overall scores out of the 15 schools that competed in their division.

“We had 21 students that participated,” Taylor said. “We took home 72 medals total. It’s truly amazing that 18 out of our 21 students all got medals in math.”

The winning students will be honored with a special assembly at Lincoln on Friday.