On the Spelling Bee

I hope you enjoyed watching Akeelah and the Bee recently in class. Although the movie was made in 2006, it still accurately shows how competitive the Scripps National Spelling Bee is, and how different the spellers can be from each other sometimes.

The Scripps Bee has been going on in Washington, D.C. since 1925. The movie accurately portrayed the pressure and that many spellers have coaches, but only touched on the fact that the best spellers READ a lot. If you look at the link to right called "Local Spelling Bee Finalists give advice," you will hear some of them tell you how important reading is to learning new words and spelling correctly. Another thing they say is to think of the words "in syllables," which is something we have been doing all year.


The school has said they will put our official school rules on our school web site by Friday, 5/18. But they have given us some guidelines already, and I will put them below:

-          Spelling Bee

-          First Round in Class

-          Should start from next Monday till the last day of May.

-          The final round student list should be ready by the end of May 31.

-          Grade 1 and all the junior highs are not in the final round

-          G2-4:G4-6&6C

-          6/7: Grade 2-4 (period 7-8)

-          6/8: Grade 5-6 (period 7-8)

-          Location: Gym (parents will be invited)

-          Final Round Rules

-          The word will be repeated twice by the judge.

-          Contestants need to say the word then spell, and then say the word again. For example, Book b-o-o-k book.

-          The first letter must be spoken out within 10 seconds. If contestants cannot open their mouth until the 11th second, then they are out.

-          Contestants need to spell correctly within 20 seconds.

-          The word must be spelled at once.

-          Students have only one chance.

-          It’s okay for students to ask the judge to repeat the word and ask for a definition.

-          The first 3 rounds, spellers will be given on grade words. The following 4 rounds will give out words that are mixed within the same group.

-          Until the 11th round, judges will give out words that belong to the next 2 grades.

-          In the very end, we will start to use the challenge list.

                                - If the student is absent in the final round, it means that student has giving up.

A couple of more points:
Grades 5 & 6 Teachers will manage the younger students (Grades 1 to 4) and Teachers from grades 1 to 4 will manage the spellers in Grades 5 & 6.

There will be a practice session for grades 5 and 6 during period 1 on June 6 in the gym.


I wish all of our spellers good luck, and have fun with the contest!

We want to say congratulations to the winners of the in-class contest we did last week:

Anna, Shaunna, Lucas, Tim, Amy

They will represent our class in the grades 5 and 6 spelling bee on June 8th. You guys need to know grade 5 and 6 words well, and if you want to win I suggest studying the grades 7 and 8 lists. If you are reading regularly, that helps. Read more English materials or novels and be a machine about looking up new words!