8th Annual Spelling Bee

This year's spelling bee was hard-fought.  After several rounds of flawless spelling, our 7th grade champion, Nik, was eliminated with the word empirical.  Then things got tricky.  Sam and August traded the lead several times as the words got progressively harder.  Sam, our 8th grade finalist, showed his fallability when he left out an L in the word fallability.  But August, winner of the 6th grade bee, missed the H in his next word, archaic, and so it went for several rounds.  All of the three finalists showed impressive spelling skills.  When Sam was given the word dystopia as his winning word, we all knew that he would prevail with a word so familiar to him.  It was an exciting event.

Spelling Bee Champion

Thank you to the many participant who qualified through the in-class, written bee. Over 40 contestants had vied in live, oral bees over the week.  Today's finals took the winners from each of the grade-wide bees to compete against each other.  

Sam will go on to represent Willard at the Bay Area Semi-Final Spelling Bee at the Lawrence Hall of Science in February.  This is a qualifying bee for the Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee.  Best of luck to Sam!