2016 Collin County Spelling Bee: One Champion, Many Winners!

Only two spellers left in the final rounds

Collin County Spelling Bee was held this week on the 3^rd. Nairit Sarkar, a 6^th grader from Rice Middle School won the spelling bee with the word tussive. Nairit will go on to our regional spelling bee on March 26. This is the second time he is on the quest for a seat on the stage of National Spelling Bee.  

The above is a short version of the event, and the event deserves more elaboration. In fact, February 3^rd was a significant day for our local spellers. This year, sixty two spellers competed for four hours for a chance to advance to the regional event. As the minutes went by, one after another, they stepped on to the center stage, facing the judges, braving some extremely difficult words, and earning high honors with either correct or incorrect spellings regardless, as true champion spellers do.

Neha spells a word on stage

In the later rounds, words went over the official word lists such as the Spell It!, the school words, the Paideia, and the CWL. These are the word lists some of our best spellers had spent months and years to prepare. Besides words from more demanding list CWL, such as tulle, velveteen, and acclivity, there were words that we often refer to as the “surprise words”, such as graptolite, diastema, klaxon (this one was used in 2007 in regional bee as a surprise word), and the winning word tussive. These words are not in the official study lists. They are the ones that came directly from the MW3rd. 

The appearances of “surprise words” can be very frustrating to spellers, especially to the ones who have less than two years’ experience in the bee. As spellers will need to spend so much time perfecting their official lists, which requires at least two years of dedicated study. Only with more time, spellers can venture outside the official lists, and start study pages of the MW3rd. When I talked to parents with aspiring spellers, I often had to stress one observation of mine: the surprise words are not too surprising after all. They tend to be medical or science words, and tend to have special spelling patterns or sounds. A careful speller can pick up many of these surprise words daily. By the way, the use of the word tussive turns out to be fairly common, as we could have heard our doctors talking about anti-tussive medicines for a cough that we seem to suffer often in the winter time. 

Our readers can find some of the harder words from Amy’s words and Rebecca's words on our website. Other study aids such as Hexco’s spelling products can be helpful as well. But the most important thing is to learn to collect words on your own, by following guide such as the spelling lessons Amy posted on this site in the past years. We also encourage spellers to attend spelling bee events each year. Basically, be more bee-like: collecting and accumulating interesting words tirelessly.

We will watch the upcoming Dallas Morning News Regional Bee on March 26, with best wishes to our champion speller Nairit and all the other champions from counties around Dallas. 

December Stories

In a small house, there lived a small child and her family. The precocious child asked her sister a simple question. As she answered colloquially, the child screamed an innocuous string of words at her. Many people thought this child’s speech to be facetious, but her family knew better. They all knew that her words were not pugnacious at all.

-Kaaviya, 4th

The insidious, triumvirate of monsters tried to prosecute against the pig who had eaten a carrot that was reserved for vivisection, but they failed and the police came and arrested them for not giving a fair trial. They tried to escape by trying to percolate through the holes in the wall of the court. The monsters met with the king of the world and made up a credible story so that the king would defend them from the police, but the king didn’t believe them, so they knocked him unconscious with a piece of ductile metal. Then the ingenious monsters trapped the police and got famous and ostentatious.

-Keran, 5th

Once upon a time, a canine wrote about when he saw a spectrum of colors. He wrote it in his diary. Then he bought tickets to a jovial opera.

-Allison, 1st

2016 Spell Success December Meeting Recap

by Allison He

 December’s meeting covered Latin words and roots - some that are commonly used like “current”, and others that are rarely seen like “corpuscle”. A good percentage of words in the English language originate from Latin, so having our spellers learn Latin roots definitely expanded their vocabulary. To strengthen our spellers’ knowledge on Latin words, the mentors set up activities like crosswords, a story consisting of Latin words in the word list, and a mini practice spelling bee for the upcoming spelling bee in January.

 

As an introduction to the meeting, Justin, our previous head mentor, gave a few inspirational words, saying, “I’m glad to be back with Spell Success. I’ll assist you guys to the best of my abilities, and in return, I hope you can learn to the best of your abilities, too.” Ximei, Jesse, and Richard, previous Spell Success mentors, were also at the meeting to help out while they could. 

 

Afterwards, our spellers split up into age groups -- 1-3 grade, 4-5 grade, 6-8 grade, and the mentors had the groups do crosswords to give them an introduction to some Latin words. While the youngest age group struggled with words like “jovial” and “optimal”, the oldest age group had to think harder with words like “perennial” and “soliloquy”, meaning “existing or continuing in the same way for a long time” and “a speech”.

Rooshi helped out with the 4th and 5th graders during the “creating a story” assignment while Kyle, Richard, and Jacqueline spent their time completing the crosswords with the youngest group. The 6-8 grade group were entirely focused on completing the crosswords, occasionally with Neha and Emily’s help, and moved on to the next task in almost no time. For the second activity, our spellers wrote stories using the Latin word lists and shared them to their group. Then the group members decided who had the best story, and the stories have been posted on a separate blog. The winners were Allison in the 1-3 grade group, Keran in the 4-5 grade group, and Kaaviya in the 6-8 grade group.

After all of the winners were selected, our spellers lined up for the mini we we moved on to a practice spelling bee in order to prepare them for upcoming spelling bees. Rooshi had them go through a practice round and gave them words like “cat” and “hair” that each of our spellers had, of course, no trouble with. Unfortunately, six of our spellers were knocked out in the first round because of challenging words like “fastidious” and “corpuscle”, but four of them remained. Two of the four remaining spellers were knocked out in the third round, which left William and Kaaviya. The points were tallied up, and Allison and both Williams placed first in their age groups. In the end, everyone who participated was rewarded with Kit Kats and Jolly Ranchers for their effort within the hour and a half.

Without the help of the mentors, their parents, and definitely the spellers, this meeting wouldn’t have been possible! Happy Holidays!  

Spell Success Meeting Notice (December 2015)