Superior, Alberton finishes spelling bees
Photo by Nick Ianniello Alberton sixth-grader Ryan Vicik tries to spell a word in the third round of a spelling bee. The winners of Thursday's bee will be participating in a county wide spelling bee Thursday.
Two Mineral County schools held spelling bees last week to find their best spellers and to pick students for this week's county-wide spelling bee.
Superior Elementary School held their spelling bee at 1 p.m. Wednesday in the school's gymnasium. Alberton had their bee at the same time on Thursday in its cafeteria.
The winners of each school's spelling bee will go on to participate in the Mineral County Spelling Bee at Superior Elementary School Thursday at 7 p.m.
The overall winner of Superior's spelling bee was sixth-grader Sam Cole, who spelled every word he was presented with correctly and won the bee by spelling the words “implement” and “carmine.”
Superior will also be sending the top four places from each grade to compete in Thursday's spelling bee. The winners in each class were Wyatt Zylawy in fifth grade, Theresa Rosheim in seventh grade and a tie between Mike Reinelt and Dylan Kuhl in eighth grade.
Overall, Superior had 29 students compete in the spelling bee, which lasted three rounds. “I was delighted with the participation,” said Angie Hopwood, a Superior Elementary School teacher who helped organize and judge the school's bee.
Alberton's spelling bee had 30 participants and they named the top three competitors from all grades. Eighth-grader Dayton Hudson got first place by spelling “hexagonal” and “solitaire.” He spent several rounds battling it out with the second place competitor, seventh-grader Todd Mystrol. The third place competitor for the day was sixth-grader Ryan Vicik.
Alberton High School English teacher Erik Johnson pronounced the words for competitors. Johnson said they would allow any of their competitors to compete in the county spelling bee, but that they were strongly encouraging the top performers to show their stuff Thursday night.
St. Regis held their spelling bee Feb. 13. Fifth-grader Dakota Wickham won by correctly spelling “incognito.”
St. Regis will be sending its top four qualifiers from each grade to the county spelling bee.
Johnson said that all of the words the students read came from the national spelling bee organization, Scripps, which provides spelling bee rules and regulations for spelling bees nationwide.
During both spelling bees, students were provided with a word from a pronouncer. They could then ask the pronouncer to repeat the word, use it in a sentence, provide a definition, provide them with the word's part of speech, or tell them the origin of the word. Johnson said these questions were designed to help students differentiate between different homonyms, such as night and knight.
Three judges presented students with either a red or green card to let competitors know whether or not they had spelled their word correctly.
After correctly spelling a word, students advanced to the next round. In order to win the final round of the spelling bee, students had to spell two words correctly, back to back. If at any point, every competitor failed to correctly spell a word in any particular round, all of the competitors from that round were brought back in.