How were those 4th grade spell-downs constructed? Just curious.
A randomly chosen group of half of the class versus the other half. The "randomness" was managed by the teacher or by choosing up sides by team leaders making choices. Of course, these methods are certainly educationally and socially unacceptable in the current environment.
The word list would be the week's spelling list, previous spelling lists, and would wrap up with challenge words that had not yet occurred on the spelling lists. It got to be quite the contest by the time it was down to the last two students. I was a finalist quite often and I'm still FaceBook friends with the girl that was the other regular finalist.