277. National Spelling Bee
I never attended any level of the National Spelling Bee until this week when my eleven-year-old granddaughter participated in the regional finals. It was held in Lipkin Theatre on the campus of Northampton Community College in Pennsylvania. There were 48 young people between fifth and eighth grades, and SadieGrace (a sixth grader) was one of them.
She spelled words like anachronism, rendezvous, gesundheit, and a few others that I can’t find in a dictionary. They spelled and spelled and the 48 were reduced one by one to ten, and five, and finally two—and Sadie was still in the running. Finally they gave her a word that she didn’t spell correctly, and the boy who was still spelling went ahead and spelled another word right and was the winner.
So Sadie was the first runner-up and won a fine dictionary AND a Kindle Fire, plus a tall trophy for her room. In the program there was a picture of each child, their name, school, grade, parents’ names, and their favorite animal and favorite word to spell. Her favorite animal is the manatee and her favorite word to spell is callipygian. Check out the meaning of that one!
