National Spelling Bee Has Started

National Spelling Bee ^ | 5/31/2006 | politicket

[politicket]

The National Spelling Bee began its first rounds today. All of the action can be followed at: www.spellingbee.com.

Also, the championship rounds will be broadcast live on ABC (for the first time) beginning at 8PM EST Thursday evening.

I'm placing my guess on Speller #238, Samir Patel, from Fort Worth, Texas. He will be worth the price of admission for you to watch tomorrow evening. He was HILARIOUS last year when we participated in the Bee!

[whd23]

"Cat"

"Cat: K A T.... I'm outta here."

[Rte66]

We also had state Latin Derivatives "bees" when I was a kid - when Latin was still a spoken language. I lived in Etruria. I was state champ, but that was the dead end - er, finis morte. No one else could speak Latin. Ha!

[Xenalyte]

They were smart! I can't imagine sitting through especially the early rounds, with kids droning easy spellings in that weird spelling-bee voice we had.

[SoftballMominVA]

eh.......I'm always being told to stop using big words

I am really proud of my kids though! We've worked all year on root words, prefixes, suffixes and etimology. Although they all have learning disabilities, they have really improved their spelling. So much for not being able to learn!

Boo Yah! :)

[Xenalyte]

When I was spelling, and admittedly this was back in the day, you could not retract what you uttered. If you started to spell "couch" as C-O-W-. . . and realized your mistake at W, it was too late.

I despise that commercial for that very reason.

[Xenalyte]

The homonym thing was why I almost always asked for a definition, and often asked for the word to be used in a sentence.

[LIConFem]

That's the Latin spelling ( parametur ).

Or not...

;o)

[octobersky]

No bios because of privacy issues? I kind of suspected that might be the case because there has been widespread publicity about sites such as MySpace attracting predators. Not a week goes by where you don't hear of an adult who used the Internet to prey on a child. What a shame is right. These kids deserve recognition for their achievements. Too bad society is such that they can no longer post pictures and brief bios of all the spellers. Thanks so much for posting a link to last year's bios. I didn't realize that they still had an active link up. And thanks for all the info and pictures you post on this topic. Yes, I remember your son from last year (he's a fine looking young man) and I was rooting for him from afar. Congrats to him and to you for doing such a fine job of raising him. Now one more question. Back when my now college-aged son was in the national spelling bee it was known as the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee. Now I see that Howard is gone and it is simply the Scripps National Spelling Bee. I wonder what happened to Howard?

[politicket]

Round #5 has now started. Three of the first four contestants have spelled their word correctly...and these three are all homeschooled!

[politicket]

Kendra Yoshinaga just spelled her word correctly as well. She is another homeschooler!

[politicket]

Kayla Hudson (#40) is coming up soon for Round #5. She is our local speller. GO KAYLA!!!!

[politicket]

Alright Kayla!!!! You did it!!!! On to Round #6 for her!

[Momaw Nadon]

Go homeschoolers!

[Betty Jane]

Thanks for the up dates. I wish I could watch it but I'm stuck at work.

[politicket]

Our local speller from Colorado (#40 - Kayla Hudson) just dropped out in Round #6.

Way to go Kayla! You did FANTASTIC!!!

[mtbopfuyn]

There are a large percent of middle eastern students this year. I also noticed that in the National Geographic Bee as well. Sad to see Bonny elimiated.

[politicket]

Bonny Jain is an excellent speller. He should hold his head up high.

It looks like they are now down to the final 13 spellers, so they will probably stop until ABC picks up the telecast later this evening (8PM EST).

It's too bad that Samir Patel just dropped out. He is a very entertaining speller.

[Flightdeck]

"The public education system is the one propagating the lie of homeschoolers being "social retards"."

I'm sure they aren't in general, but on the subject of the spelling bee, the homeschooled girl who won it six or seven years ago was truly to be pitied. Both parents were neuroscientists and they must have been using her as a lab rat. She will never know what it is like to have a circle of friends and probably never get married, she was so tragically bizarre.

Unless things have changed a lot in the past several years, and I'm sure they haven't, the parents of these children are doing more harm than good. I made it to the finals when I was a kid (but only got on C-SPAN, boo hoo). With the exception of a few normal kids whose parents encouraged them, but did NOT become CONSUMED, I was surrounded by future mental patients.

[Warren_Piece]

In all seriousness, my English grades skyrocketed the year after I started taking Latin. It made no sense to me at the time (Why do I suddenly GET this?). I'm really going to insist that my kids take at least one year of Latin.

[Momaw Nadon]

Which of the final 13 spellers are home-schooled?