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Spelling Bee Buzz

Posted by tom | May 27, 2009

The twins have a Spelling Bee at school this morning.  Wish we would have practiced over the past several weeks instead of mostly cramming last night and this morning.  Below's a list of some of the words, how would you have done in third grade?

  • caught
  • eight
  • expect
  • escape
  • it's
  • its
  • kitchen
  • paint 
  • November
  • smile 
  • strength
  • thermometer
  • thought
  • tomorrow 
  • through
P.S.  Spelling's never been a strength of mine, particularly under pressure ...

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4 Comments & 0 Trackbacks of "Spelling Bee Buzz"

    How do they differentiate between "its" and "it's" in a spelling bee? I guess if they use it in a sentence, that would help, unless it was a particularly devious sentence.

    "Please spell 'it's'."
    "Can you use it in a sentence?"
    "It's the one without an apostrophe."

    I probably would have done better in 3rd grade than now; I won a couple of spelling bees back in the day. Unfortunately, spellcheck has made me a little lazy about things like "-ible" vs "-able" or "-ent/ence" vs "-ant/ance".

    Posted by Andy, May 27 2009, 20:25

    Yes, the challenge of homophones and contractions in a spelling bee ... "Their" teacher used sentences for each of the words and pointed out contractions.

    Ellen spelled "its." Her teacher regularly uses the sentence "Its tail is wagging." But Ellen's not sure if that was the sentence yesterday. She also spelled "they're," as in "They're [They are] going to a party." Note: A friend spelled "it's" as in "It's [it is] going to rain." Interesting fact: three students fell to "dodge."

    As spell-checker has also become a friend of mine, I don't think I'd be up for a spelling bee challenge. What do you do when the spell checker is not "their to help you with misspellings or other miss-takes?"

    Posted by Tom Grosh, May 28 2009, 07:28

    Andy: I like your example sentence. That would be bound to get some people to spell "it's" incorrectly.

    As for what do I do without a spell-checker - I generally just know how to spell things by looking at them (I suspect I might be sort of bad at a spelling bee - at least the ones I've seen videos of, since you have to figure out how to spell it audibly, rather than in written form.

    But, just a second ago, I depended on Firefox's built-in spelling checker to make sure I spelled "precedent" correctly, as it didn't look quite right. I also debated about "surgery" this morning, as it looked sort of like "sugary", and I had to decide whether it was correct or not.

    Posted by Jon Daley, May 29 2009, 11:22

    Ellen & Hayley enjoyed staying up 'late' to watch most of the Spelling Bee, http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/05/28/national.spelling.bee/ As for myself, lots of proper names on which I would have been fallen. But due to my reading of the book of Revelation, I wouldn't have been "lukewarm" on the championship winning word ;-)

    Posted by Tom Grosh, May 29 2009, 13:43
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