By JOYANNA LOVE/ Senior Staff Writer

CLANTON —It was a successful day for the Clanton Intermediate Elementary Science Olympiad team at this year’s competition at Jacksonville High School.

The students placed third overall out of 32 schools. The teams came away a number of awards including four first place, three second place, three third place, one fourth place and one sixth place.

Teachers Brooke Sullivan and Trish Karn were the coaches for the team. Students are selected based on ACT Aspire scores, grades, Accelerated Math and Reader scores as well as teacher recommendations. Students practiced an hour after school each Tuesday in preparation for the competition.

Campell Easterling said she was “excited and nervous” to be a part of the team.

“I wanted to do it because I wanted to learn,” Easterling said

She and Helen Nguyen placed first in the Boggle Science category.

“I wasn’t really surprised. I was really confident in it because I thought we got a lot of words,” Nguyen said.

The students had to find science related words in a word search style puzzle. Easterling said they prepared for the competition by doing practice puzzles and studying lists of science terms.

Easterling also placed sixth in How Do You Spell Science (with Barrett Martin) and third place for In Bloom (with Bryce Snider.)

Sara Newton and Brayden Mims placed first in Geometrics.

Newton said the team prepared for the event by practicing finding the area and perimeter of various shapes.

“I was shocked,” Newton said of winning first.

Audrey Armstrong placed first in both of her categories: Infographics (with Emma Penley) and It’s Elemental (with Ella Price.) Armstrong said she felt confident that she had done well in her categories, but first place still came as a surprise. In the Infographics category, Penley said students had to create a pie chart as well as line and bar graphs from information provided.

“We felt pretty good about it,” Penley said.

For It’s Elemental, Armstrong and Price had to name several elements of the Periodic Table.

“It was just super fun,” Price said.

She said she was nervous at first, but felt more confident when she began the test.

Nguyen and Brady Smitherman placed second in No Bones About It.

“We had to study the whole skeletal system and how many vertebra and how many bones in your hand (etc.), ” Nguyen said. “It was a lot of fun. I learned a lot of new things.”

Smitherman said they needed to know how many bones an adult and a newborn had. He said he enjoyed “learning more about the human body.”

Placing second was “exciting,” he said.

Connor Griffin and Jorge Castillo-Rosiles placed second in Space Invaders, which dealt with the history of space launches.

Castillo-Rosiles said they researched information and memorized it to prepare for the competition. Griffin said they also had to know why the shuttle or satellite was launched.

“I was nervous, but I was confident,” Castillo-Rosiles said.

Griffin also placed fourth in Triple Play.

Jaylen Torres and Miguel Gomez placed second in Don’t Bug Me, in which they had to classify arthropods and name body parts.

“It was exciting, and I was just glad that I got chosen to participate in this event,” Torres said.

He and Gomez quizzed each other on the information in preparation for the competition.