Grader

It took a full marching band, more than one official resolution, a Baltimore Raven and two busloads of screaming sixth-graders to properly send Baltimore's first world-class speller in at least a generation off to The Big Show. David Brokaw, a Friends School sixth-grader with bright eyes and circumspect grin, is headed to Washington for the National Spelling Bee, where today he'll face some serious c-o-m-p-e-t-i-t-i-o-n. He'll be Baltimore's first representative at the esteemed contest of words in 25 years and one of the few city students ever to compete there.

Looking for something on TV the whole family can enjoy - only to feel humiliated and depressed afterward? Got just the ticket: the new hit Fox show Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? We'll get to the humiliating and depressing part in a minute. If you haven't seen it, Are You Smarter? is a quiz show where adults get asked questions supposedly found in elementary school textbooks. Naturally, these loser adults stumble and sweat over the answers, while a bunch of cute fifth-graders on the set smirk and offer help.

EXPERIENCE IS A powerful teacher, as about 30 Oklahoma Road Middle School pupils realized last week during a schoolwide Disabilities Awareness Week program.The program was led by teachers Lois Dolan, Mary Cavaness, Maggie Grossman and Karen Jablon, and assistants Karen Sirko and Jill Johnson, who make up the school's resource team.Through exercises Wednesday, pupils spent several hours experiencing simulated disabilities to gain insight into what disabled people experience daily.Students experienced simulated disabilities such as blindness, inability to speak, conditions requiring the use of a wheelchair, and the inability to use their dominant hand.

THE PHONE RANG A couple of weeks ago, and it was that nice lady from the blood bank at Anne Arundel Medical Center, asking if I could make another donation. I asked her to call me back after April 15 and I'd see how much blood I had left.As it happened, the tax man spared me some, so I made a date for this past Friday morning.I like to schedule a donation first thing in the morning, right after I drop my daughter off at school. It's not unpleasant at all.First you have a nice chat while the nurse takes your temperature and blood pressure, checks your pulse and takes a sample from the tip of your middle finger.

Once, a boy who didn't make the freshman football team at Loyola High School was given a chance to play lacrosse. The game demanded enthusiasm and desire, and the boy did well.Today he is the school's director of admissions and its varsity lacrosse coach.The life of 47-year-old Joe McFadden is like the canvas of an impressionist painter. Stand up close and you can see the individual elements -- family, work, lacrosse. Move back and the separate brush strokes merge into a singular life in which all three are firmly interwoven.

Tommy Paul, a seventh-grader who is taught at home by his mother, was awarded first prize and a $100 savings bond yesterday in an art contest sponsored by Project PUNCH, the Junior League of Baltimore and the Carroll Park Foundation.Tommy's pastel, representing what Carroll Park might have looked like in the past, will be used to create a logo for both Project PUNCH -- Partners United for a New Carroll's Hundred -- and for a banner that will be on permanent display at the park.More than 60 entries were submitted.

MANCHESTER Elementary pupils taught by Marsha Theisson exhibited artwork at Carrolltown Center in Eldersburg this month to celebrate Youth Art Month.Fourth-graders, who recently studied Colonial life of children in Maryland, learned to stitch a type of sampler with yarn upon burlap. Each chose to illustrate a different state symbol in stitchery.Michael Palmer stitched a Chesapeake Bay retriever, the state dog; Brittany Golden, a blue crab; Brandon Epps, a great blue heron; and Michael Reed, the state fish, a striped bass, including French knots for spots.

For Martin O'Malley, yesterday was a day of firsts as Baltimore's mayor.He attended his first religious service, picked up a gold-painted shovel for his first groundbreaking and spent his first Saturday having his sleeve tugged by people eager to talk to, touch or plead with him.Sworn in Tuesday morning as the city's 47th chief executive, O'Malley started his weekend in East Baltimore at the Lloyd Street Synagogue, the third-oldest in the United States....

Teachers at Friendship Valley Elementary in Carroll County may want to pinch themselves, thinking they must be dreaming.Or maybe not.Voluntarily, their pupils are scrambling to the library so they can read additional books after they've done their homework.What's more, they are doing it not only to improve their reading skills, but also to participate in a charitable venture: If the student body can read 2,000 hours by Dec. 19, the PTO will donate at least 200 books to a local homeless shelter, the pediatric unit at Carroll County General Hospital and to an elementary school elsewhere in the state or country.

The Pyziks are creating a dynasty of sorts in local sports, with members of this exceptional, extended family making names for themselves on playing fields throughout the Baltimore area.Jill Pyzik is a three-sport star at North Carroll, and she helped the Panthers' soccer team win the Class 3A West regional title last November. Her cousin, Maggie, pitched a no-hitter for John Carroll in March against St. Mary's.Their cousin, Steve, who is going to Clemson this fall on a baseball scholarship, is one of only three Loyola players -- his uncle, Joe, is one of the others -- to hit a home run onto the roof of the school gymnasium behind the right-field fence.

A new partnership between seven Rotary Clubs in Howard County and the school system will give every third-grader in the county a new dictionary, school officials said. The dictionaries have been distributed since the beginning of the school year to the 3,500 third-graders in the county, said school system spokeswoman Patti Caplan. Dictionaries also have been given to the Bridges Program, an after-school program for underachieving students. Under the partnership, which is scheduled to be formalized Wednesday, the seven clubs have agreed to purchase and distribute copies of A Student's Dictionary & Gazetteer.

Mariah Sandy, 10, left the Wilde Lake Interfaith Center energized and determined to return to her school and pass along her newfound knowledge about leadership. "I know how to be a good leader without being too bossy," the Atholton Elementary School fifth-grader said confidently as she stood among a small group of classmates. "I'm going to tell them everything I know." It's never too early to prepare to become a leader. Mariah was one of 400 fourth- and fifth-graders from 27 Howard County schools who learned about leadership at the fifth annual Peer Leadership Conference on Thursday.

Julio Valcarcel III built a self-propelled machine, a remote-controlled robot and a wooden catapult for competitions yesterday at the Maryland State Science Olympiad at the Johns Hopkins University. He is 13. In an event dubbed "The Scrambler," the Thurmont Middle School eighth-grader and his seventh-grade teammate Morgan Smith launched the self-propelled device from a ramp toward a wall 9 meters away. It had to start and stop on its own, without cracking a raw egg attached to the contraption's nose (hence the name of the event)

Donning his favorite Marine uniform - the formal "dress blues" - Sgt. Jerrett Peake surveyed the dozens of small faces staring up at him yesterday morning at Manchester Elementary School in Carroll County. After a brief introduction and greeting, several small hands shot in the air with questions for the 22-year-old soldier who left Iraq last month. "Do you ever get homesick?" (Sometimes. But letters help with that.) "Do you use night-vision goggles?" (Yes, and he also gets to fix them.

You're never too young to set your sights on college, the folks at Baltimore's CollegeBound Foundation say, so the organization's "What College Means to Me" annual contest starts with kids in kindergarten. At 6 years old, MaKayla Westry knows a thing or two about the subject: She sometimes tags along to her mom's forensic accounting classes at Morgan State University. The Leith Walk Elementary first-grader's views on college ("it's fun!") won her a prize in the contest's poetry division.

It took a full marching band, more than one official resolution, a Baltimore Raven and two busloads of screaming sixth-graders to properly send Baltimore's first world-class speller in at least a generation off to The Big Show. David Brokaw, a Friends School sixth-grader with bright eyes and circumspect grin, is headed to Washington for the National Spelling Bee, where today he'll face some serious c-o-m-p-e-t-i-t-i-o-n. He'll be Baltimore's first representative at the esteemed contest of words in 25 years and one of the few city students ever to compete there.

Curious about what's on the minds of Maryland's youth? Staged readings of seven student scripts will be presented at Center Stage on Monday as part of the theater's 21st annual Young Playwrights Festival. Selected from submissions by more than 300 students, the plays being read include four by elementary and middle schoolers: Yankee Haters, in which three friends debate everything from baseball to the Revolutionary War, by Paul Gianfrancesco, a fifth-grader at Whetstone Elementary in Gaithersburg; The Survey, about a little girl who changes an older student's views about a woman in the White House, by Alice Sheehan (conceived with Ariel Wasserman)

Looking for something on TV the whole family can enjoy - only to feel humiliated and depressed afterward? Got just the ticket: the new hit Fox show Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? We'll get to the humiliating and depressing part in a minute. If you haven't seen it, Are You Smarter? is a quiz show where adults get asked questions supposedly found in elementary school textbooks. Naturally, these loser adults stumble and sweat over the answers, while a bunch of cute fifth-graders on the set smirk and offer help.

On the second floor of East Middle School, Chad Arrington, 19, split his time between scanning a seventh-grader's math worksheet on transformations and looking for the word "jihad" in a puzzle. Downstairs, Drew Strumsky, 19, leaned back in his chair as he quizzed three sixth-graders on vocabulary terms relating to Egypt. Later, near a back entrance, Kurt Rauschenberg, 25, pulled up on the bitter-cold afternoon with a camouflage-painted Humvee and howitzer. The three are McDaniel College mentors, and part of a new program called T'N'T - Trust and Teamwork - for middle school boys.

When she heard one girl tell another that she could not sit down at a lunch table, Jessica Downing, 12, a seventh-grader at Ellicott Mills Middle School, immediately stepped in and voiced an objection. "I told her it's just a spot; it doesn't matter," Jessica recalls saying, echoing sentiments she learned in the school's "Words Can Heal" campaign, which discourages put-downs and verbal harassment. "She kind of got mad at me. The other girl said, `Thanks.' It felt good after she said, `Thanks.