La Crescenta, LCF Students Earn Vocabulary Awards

Students from La Crescenta, La Canada and San Marino have been awarded trophies by “The 500 Club” for learning new vocabulary.

Eighteen students and their parents enjoyed a celebratory picnic and ceremony at Eisenhower Park in Arcadia earlier this month. This year, Fuzuki Yoshie, 9, of La Canada and Marina Hashimoto, 16, of San Marino earned membership into The 500 Club by mastering their first 500 words. Hashimoto went on to learn 1000 more words, for a total of 1500 in only about six months.

In 1993, private tutor Sara Smith wanted to encourage her students to actively search out and master new words. She created “The 500 Club” as an incentive to make learning new vocabulary fun. Since then, students have earned hundreds of trophies for memorizing new vocabulary at 500 word intervals.

Other winners this year all added to their totals from last year’s awards ceremony, according to a press release from The 500 Club. Misato Fujimori, 11, of La Crescenta, learned 500 more words for 1000. Rei Tanaka, 16, and Yumiko Kawakami, 17, both of San Marino, learned 1000 for 3500, and Yumiko’s sister Makiko, 11, learned 1000 to become the youngest student ever to receive the 4000-word trophy.

The biggest star was Kojiro Semba,17, who moved from San Marino to Torrance this year. He took trophies for 4000 and 5000 words! Semba is also doing well on his SATs as he prepares for college applications, the press release states.

The astounding record of 5500 words – reached in 2004 – is still held by Mio Kohara of Arcadia, a graduate of Tokyo University in Japan.

Tutors Smith and Cindy Croyle, sponsors of The 500 Club, are pleased with the stellar accomplishments of their students. Smith is a professional tutor licensed by Applied Scholastics™, a non-profit group of over 1200 educators, schools, and community centers world-wide using the Study Technology of L. Ron Hubbard.