State Geography Bee

Last weekend we took the whole family to Dallas for McKay's Geography Bee competition. As I mentioned in an earlier post, he qualified to be one of the 100 kids to compete at the state level. The competition was held at a school district in Bedford, TX, near the DFW airport. We pulled the kids out of school about early Thursday afternoon and hit the road. We got settled in the hotel that night and got up early the next morning to get breakfast and get McKay registered. Here the kids are before leaving that morning. McKay was pretty nervous! We found the school district building pretty easily -- it was only about 10 miles from our hotel. Here's McKay outside the building:

We got McKay registered and went into the main room. They had a lot of chairs set up and a stage area where the final competition would take place. In front of the stage where bags that had an atlas and T-shirt for all the competitors to take home at the end (with some pretty cool globe balloons attached).

As part of the registration, they gave the kids a little tag with their name printed on it for them to pin onto a Texas map indicating where they were from. We thought it was pretty cool that McKay's pin was all by its lonesome -- he was the only kid from West Texas or the panhandle area.

The majority of the pins were in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, the Houston area, or the Austin area, with several also from San Antonio. There was another lonely one way down at the tip of South Texas -- that would have been a long trip too!

We found some seats and waited for everything to start. They had some big screens where they were playing one of the previous year's national finals (which are held in Washington DC and are hosted by Alex Trebek).

When it was time to start, they give us all the instructions and rules and then had the kids divide up into groups of 20 (based on the color of the name tag they were given). Each group was taken into another room with the judges for the preliminary rounds -- no parents or teachers were allowed to watch. So we just sat around and waited an hour or so for the kids to come back in.

In the preliminary rounds, they ask the kids questions in several different categories and keep score of how many they get right. Then they take the top 10 kids for the final compeition, which everybody gets to watch. When McKay came back in after his preliminary rounds, he was excited to tell us he was gonig to the tie-breaker round. It turned out that there were 8 kids who got perfect scores so there were 2 spots left for the final 10. There happened to be 25 kids who missed only one question -- McKay included -- so they came up on stage for the tie-breaker.

Each kid on stage had a little white board. They were all asked the same question and then they wrote down their answer and held it up after a certain amount of time. If the answer was wrong, they were eliminated and left the stage. This was repeated until there were only 2 kids left. McKay ended up getting the first question in the tie-breaker round wrong. We could tell he was really disappointed, but we were so proud of him!

Once the final 10 were decided, they moved into the final round and kids were eliminated (double-elimination in this round) fairly quickly and it got down to 3 boys. And these kids just blew me away. They just did not get any questions wrong -- it was amazing. The whole audience just sat in awe of these kids. Way out of our league! The judges ran out of questions in the regular booklet they had before they got down to the final 2, so they had to go back to past year's competitions and kept looking for the hardest questions they could find and still the boys didn't miss any! (Our girls were getting awfully fidgety -- and hungry -- by this point.)

Finally, they got it down to the final two for the last "championship round", which of course went on and on until they found a question that one of the kids missed. Wow. We found out later that the boy who won (he is in 7th grade -- the competition is for 4th - 8th graders) is the same kid who won the TX bee last year, but he did not win the national bee, so he gets another shot. I think he'll be a tough kid to beat! (And I think by the end, McKay was feeling much better about himself and his performance.)

We took a couple more pictures at the end -- here is McKay with his Geography coach, who also came for the competition. She is the 6th grade geography teacher at the middle school and the sponsor of the Geography Club, which McKay is a member of. She had been helping him study in the weeks leading up to the compeition.

And we took a family picture too!

Here's McKay back at the hotel in this new Geography Bee T-shirt.

Overall, it was a really good experience and we all learned a lot of geography in the process! Next up -- the rest of the weekend including our trip to Six Flags!