Blog: Dermot Cole
Top spellers display their skills
Published Saturday, February 28, 2009
The top finishers in the 16th Annual Interior Alaska Spelling Bee today showed they have a way with words.
The bee, which is sponsored by the News-Miner and the Fairbanks school district, gives public and private school students from our region a chance to compete for the right to travel to the national event in Washington, D.C.
There were kids from Fort Yukon, Healy, Nenana, Tok, Beaver, Delta, and most of the public and private elementary and middle schools in the Fairbanks area.
The Anchorage spelling bee, which operates under the misnomer "Alaska Spelling Bee," offers students from the more southerly region of our state a chance to go to Washington as well.
On Saturday, Tianna Beckley, a seventh-grader at the Chugach Extension home school program, edged Miranda Atkinson, a sixth-grader at Denali Elementary School, to claim the Interior spelling title.
As one of the judges I was starting to think that we would be in Hering Auditorium all day as neither Tianna nor Miranda displayed any hint that they might ever get a word wrong.
They raced through such gems as: douane, diffa, feldsher, kirtle, mihrab, sachem, fete, schnecke, hartebeest, Croesus, melange, prosciutto, pickelhaube, Holi, jacamar, cappelletti, philhellenism, salaam, foggara, durwan, schipperke, pizzicato, barukhzy, keeshond and bobbejaan.
In the latter rounds they gave the letters so fast it was a challenge for this judge to keep up. Thanks to my fellow judges, Kathyrn Dodge and B.J. Craig, we managed to stay on track, however.
That Tianna and MIranda spelled so many difficult words as fast as they could was the most obvious sign that they had done their homework.
In the end, Miranda missed a letter in "ideogram," which is the name for a composite Chinese character, and Tianna spelled "quietive," which refers to something with a tranquilizing effect, and the bee ended after more than two dozen rounds.
Congratulations to Tianna, Miranda and the nearly 100 other students from schools throughout the Interior who took part.
Cynthia Sibitzky, a music teacher at Crawford Elementary School, was the pronouncer. She did a fantastic job and I promised her I would try to spell her name right this time.
Congratulations Tianna. You have certainly worked hard these past few years spelling for over an hour every Saturday afternoon and many other hours that I am not aware of.
Tianna, you are probably not going to sleep tonight, are you? You will probably be too excited! Daddy is right--you and I certainly did spell a lot. I look forward to continuing spelling together and wearing a groove in Daddy's wood floor from pacing circles as we spell.
Melissa
Schipperke and Keeshond should be capitalized, because, as the official names of dog breeds, they are proper nouns.
I gotta admit, though, that I never ever HEARD of most of those words the girls spelled!
Congratulations, Tianna!!!
By the way, Tianna is also fluent in sign language. :-)
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