We studied the words and made flash cards and she knew most of them on the list pretty good -- but unfortunately we didn't start studying early enough to really nail the more difficult words (although she did have down words like "photosynthesis" and "psychoanalysis"). The morning of the bee she was pretty nervous and told me she had lots of butterflies in her tummy. I told her she would do fine and we would be proud of her no matter what -- even if she got out on her very first word. I told her the story of my most memorable spelling bee from 7th grade where I got a little careless and spelled too quickly and got out on my first word (which I still remember -- gauge).
Brian and I were both there to watch her. There were 25 kids and she drew number 9 in the rotation. And she did great! Especially for her first spelling bee. She made it down to 8 kids left (the majority of them 4th graders). She got out on the word fallacy -- she left out the second "a" which she told me later she thought she said because she knew how to spell that word. But she also told me she was glad she wasn't in it at the end because they started going into harder words that hadn't been on the list given to the kids to study and she for sure would have been out then.
Here are the video clips of each of her turns (at the beginning, they had the kids practice by coming up to the microphone and spelling their name).
In case you couldn't hear well -- her words were: exact, solemn, dynamite, competitive, indelible and fallacy.
I took a picture of her on stage after it was over -- she looks like she's trying a bit too hard to be happy, but really she was fine! (I did see several kids in tears, but she wasn't one of them.)
We're so proud of her!
1 comment:
Grat jobe Hana!
Post a Comment