Spelling Bee Champ!

Starting early in August we received the Scripps Spelling Bee challenge. Because the children had all done spelling bees and usually didn't do so well or were eliminated quickly, they frequently became discouraged. However last year, Sarah won Second Place in her junior high division and they all became excited. All of my children are fairly good spellers, never really having a problem with words, but the scripps words come from all languages that english has developed as part of our everyday words and they are very challenging even for the judges to pronunciate! So going back to my original sentence, we took on this challenge and the spelling words differently than ever before. They took 5 words a day from different languages and had to define them, write a sentence with them and say-spell-say the word 3 times. By Thursday they had studied 20 spelling words for that week and vocabulary mind you because of the definitions and such. On Friday we held a spelling bee in our house which quickly brought out the competitiveness in all my kids! Each week a new speller would emerge the winner and would get a candy bar, coke, or game time with Mom. Isabella was against her two siblings who were middle schoolers. She rarely won, but she tried very hard.

This brought us all the way to February for the spelling bee. We had a practice bee on January 31st and Isabella was eliminated both practice rounds the first time around. Sarah and Zech though continued battling each other after the others in their division misspelled for several rounds. Zech won both of those practice rounds.

Yesterday though in the official Homeschool Spelling Bee, Sarah became the middle school division champion! This was her last year to compete and therefore we are so very proud of her. She goes onto the regional bee at our local College on March 7th! Start praying for her now, she has her sights set on Washington DC!!!!!

Congrats Sarah, we are so very proud of you!