Download Spelling Bee Competition
Syed Kleiner
For $199 per school, you'll receive all the study lists, competition instructions and supplementary materials needed to engage your students in Classroom and School Spelling Bees. Your school's enrollment also provides your school champion with a pathway to compete in your community's regional program and beyond!
This month, the Bee's Bookshelf selection is The Winterton Deception 1: Final Word by Janet Sumner Johnson. In this twisty middle grade mystery, thirteen-year-old twins Hope and Gordon enter a spelling bee in a last-ditch effort to save their family from financial ruin, only to find themselves in a cut-throat competition to uncover a fortune and dark secrets about the wealthy relations they've never known.
There is also a timer which runs down while you are spelling the words. If the timer runs out before the game is completed, then you lose and the game is over. Once you have spelt all the items in the content set, the game also finishes and displays the scores screen. The countdown timer should get faster as you progress through the sets. In this way, the game should get more challenging. If you click the wrong letter, then you don't lose you can just try another one until you get it right. In this way there is a little bit of trial and error in learning to spell words that you don't know.
The idea for this game is that by spelling words again and again very quickly you can become a better speller and also become more familiar with the vocabulary items and the letters used to form them.
You know, because of this event, I learned that the study of spelling is called orthography. Orthography -- that's o-r-t-h-o-g-r-a- . . . uh . . . p . . . ummm . . . [laughter] . . . ummm . . . h-y. [Laughter] No, I'm sure you already knew that, and you were just proving it, but I thought I'd give you that just in case they asked for it on Wednesday.
But all of us are proud not only of your spelling ability but of your determination to increase your knowledge. I wish all American students were as interested in their studies as you evidently are and have been. And I wish all teachers and parents took an interest in their children's educational development as your parents and teachers have taken in yours.
Now, on Wednesday, you're going to be feeling the pressure of the competition. But I want you to know that you're already -- all of you -- winners in my book and in the hearts of your hometowns. So, enjoy the competition and enjoy your trip to Washington. I hope you've been having some fun and seeing some of the sights here.
The Scripps National Spelling Bee (formerly the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee and commonly called the National Spelling Bee) is an annual spelling bee held in the United States. The bee is run on a not-for-profit basis by The E. W. Scripps Company and is held at a hotel or convention center in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area during the week following Memorial Day weekend. Since 2011, it has been held at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center hotel in National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland, just outside Washington D.C. It was previously held at the Grand Hyatt Washington in Washington D.C. from 1996 to 2010.
Although most of its participants are from the U.S., students from countries such as The Bahamas, Canada, the People's Republic of China, India, Ghana, Japan, Jamaica, Mexico, and New Zealand have also competed in recent years. Historically, the competition has been open to, and remains open to, the winners of sponsored regional spelling bees in the U.S. (including territories such as Guam, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, the Navajo Nation, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, along with overseas military bases in Germany and South Korea). Participants from countries other than the U.S. must be regional spelling-bee winners as well.
Contest participants cannot be older than fourteen as of August 31 of the year before the competition; nor can they be past the eighth grade as of February 1 of that year's competition. Previous winners are also ineligible to compete.[1]
In 2019, the Spelling Bee ran out of words that might challenge the contestants and ended up having 8 winners. The 2020 National Spelling Bee competition, originally scheduled for May 24, was suspended and later canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.[2][3][4] This was the first time it had been canceled since 1945.[5]
To qualify for the Scripps National Spelling Bee, a speller must win a regional competition. Regional spelling bees usually cover many counties, with some covering an entire state, U.S. territory, or foreign country. Regional competitions' rules are not required to correspond exactly to those of the national competition; most notably, the national competition has since 2004 featured time controls that are designed to ensure its conformity to the programming schedule of its nationwide television broadcaster (see Regulations of oral rounds below) and that are not intended to be implemented at lower levels of competition.
Most school and regional bees (known to Scripps as local spelling bees) use the official study booklet. Through competition year 1994, the study booklet was known as Words of the Champions; during competition years 1995 through 2006, the study booklet was the category-based Paideia; in 2007 the format and title were changed to the 701-word Spell It!, and since 2020 a new edition of Words of the Champions has been used. The booklet is published by Merriam-Webster in association with the National Spelling Bee. It contains 4,000 words, divided primarily by language of origin, along with exercises and activities in each section. Most bees whose winners advance to regional-level competition use the School Pronouncer's Guide, which contains a collection of Words of the Champions words as well as "off-list words" not listed in Words of the Champions but featured in Scripps' official dictionary, the unabridged Webster's Third New International Dictionary (published by Merriam-Webster).[citation needed]
To participate in the national competition, a speller must be sponsored. Scripps has 281 sponsors (mostly newspapers) from the U.S., Canada, The Bahamas, New Zealand, Asia, and Europe covering a certain area and conducting their own regional spelling bees to send spellers to the national level.
Sponsorship is available on a limited basis to daily and weekly newspapers serving English-speaking populations around the world. Each sponsor organizes a spelling bee program in its community with the cooperation of area school officials: public, private, parochial, charter, virtual, and home schools.
The Preliminaries consists of a test (Preliminaries Test) delivered by computer on Tuesday and two rounds of oral spelling onstage on Wednesday. Spellers may earn up to 36 points during the Preliminaries: up to 30 points on the Preliminaries Test, three points for correctly spelling in Round Two and three points for correctly spelling in Round Three.
The Preliminaries Test (also called round one) has four sections, most of which administered by a computer system. Round One of the preliminaries consists of two sections; Section A consists of spelling 24 words, identical for each contestant, while Section B contains 24 multiple-choice vocabulary questions; only 12 questions in each section are actually scored, awarding one point each. Section C and D, preliminary rounds two and three, each consist of a single multiple-choice vocabulary question unique to every contestant and worth three points. A contestant can score up to 30 points in this round.[9]
Round One was a written spelling test, and has changed in format several times. In the few years prior to 2008, Round One consisted of a 25-word, multiple-choice written test. However, in 2010, changes were made in the formatting of this test. It consisted of 25 words, sometimes called "the written round". All spellers gathered at the Maryland Ballroom by 8:00 a.m. Jacques Bailly, the Bee's official pronouncer (also the 1980 champion) pronounced each word, its language of origin, definition, and usage in a sentence. Spellers are given a 30-second pause in which to write down their word with the two pens given to them, and then Bailly repeated the word and all information. There was another 30-second pause, and then they moved onto the next word. Each correctly spelled word on the Round One written test was worth one point. In 2011, they stayed with that format. In 2012, they changed to the original computerized test, 50 spelling words, half scored and half not scored.
Beginning in 2013, the test now includes vocabulary questions, such as being asked to choose the correct definition for a word. While met with criticism by past contestants for deviating from the concept of a spelling bee, organizers indicated that the change was made to help avert perceptions that the competition was based solely on memorization skills (as had been showcased by television broadcasts), and to help further the Bee's goal of expanding the vocabulary and language skills of children.[10]
Round Two is an oral round, in which each contestant must spell a different word from the "Words of the Champions" list as specified by the judges. A correct spelling awards three points, while a miss eliminates the contestant. In the latter case, the judges give the correct spelling. All contestants eliminated in this round tie for the same place in the final rankings.
Before 2004, a speller could not be required to spell a given word until the judges deemed that the word had been clearly pronounced and identified by the speller; even then, judges rarely if ever instructed a contestant to begin spelling unless it was obvious that the speller was making no further progress in figuring out the word and that he/she was instead simply "stalling for time". Most local and regional competitions continue to follow this rule and enforcement pattern, although they are not obliged to do so.
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