Spelling Bee Madness!

I can't remember if I've blogged about the Spelling Bee that Kristen and I have organized in Casariche. Sorry if I repeat myself.

We've been working on ABC's and spelling since Easter in preparation for the First (I hope annual) All-School Spelling Bee. This is of course in English. We did a preliminary written test in order to weed out some of the kids who hadn't studied or really had no interest. The test consisted of students writing the word said, something a lot more difficult for Spanish speakers to do that we English speakers many times realize. Spanish is, after all, nearly 100% phonetic. One girl in Second grade got 100%! I was so proud of her. :)

This week we've begun the first round at the class level. This time it's like a normal spelling bee except that we changed one rule and that is that if students recognize that they've made a mistake spelling before they finish, they can correct themselves starting over from the beginning of the word. The purpose at this level is to get one winner from each class who will then compete with the other winners from his/her cycle (the cycles are 1st/2nd, 3rd/4th and 5th/6th).

Yesterday in my first class (fourth grade) we got through about 40 words and there were two students who just kept going. I made each round of words more difficult, but even Wednesday, February, and Shoulders failed to knock one or the other out! Class time was up and the teacher suggested that they should both pass to the next round. After consulting with my co-auxiliar and our bilingual coordinator, we agreed--both will compete at the cycle level.

I was bragging about that fourth grade class until I got into my all-time favorite (p.s. had to count that spelling wrong yesterday when a girl left the u out of "favourite") class--second grade B. These kids are amazing and I knew it was going to be a really exciting competition. I told Kristen she should skip out on her class with the three year olds and come to watch. I'm glad she did because had I told her later what happened, she probably wouldn't have believed me!

Eight kids from this class qualified to pass and all of those eight had higher than a five (50%) on the preliminary test. Just for reference, in most of the other classes the highest scores were fives and many kids passed on with threes. The spelling began. The first round finished and not one error! After four rounds we finally knocked one kid out and there were a few with errors (we did double elimination). I used up all fifty words on my sheet and there were still five students who hadn't made two mistakes the whole time!

We're talking about second grade!! They're spelling in English, a second language, using the English Alphabet. That's really tricky, too, because in Spanish the letter i is pronounced "ee"... along with other letter sound difficulties--that's confusing! I almost had tears in my eyes as these kids nailed every single word--horse, Saturday, Wednesday, February, Scissors--I'm going to upload the list for you to see.

Probably one of the cutest things was the class's reaction. I told them ahead of time that there was no clapping and no talking. The only thing they could say was "good job" when a student finished spelling and they had to "clap" in sign language. Sign language clapping, if you don't know, is similar to what happens at a basketball game in high school when the opposite team's making a free-throw: open palm hand shaking, but no noise. You should have seen these kids shaking their hands like mad and repeating over and over, "Good Job!" It was just too adorable.

I was thinking about it later and I don't think that a lot of native English speakers could do what these kids did. I know that when I was in second grade I couldn't have done this. Spelling in English is really tough. I remember on my end of the year State tests that I scored 30% on the spelling portion!! (Yeah, never was a star speller...thank God for spell check!) And developmentally it's really almost absurd to ask such little kids (we did this in first grade, too) to visualize a word and then spell it out loud. For young kids there's a BIG difference between being able to write a word correctly and being able to spell it out loud. That said, there was a girl in first grade who correctly spelled table! There's a silent e at the end...not to mention that the long a sound in Spanish is represented by two vowels (ei).

I was happily surprised and VERY impressed.

Needless to say I came home from school glowing with pride for my little spellers. Angelines is probably tired of hearing about how cool it was and how difficult and what an amazing feat this really is. ;)

I can't wait for the school level competition...We're going to have to come up with a really tough list unless we want everyone to tie!