Spelling Bee

This past semester my students competed in a spelling bee. This is a compitition run by many volunteers through out Kosovo, and was started at my school by the previous volunteer (thanks Liz!). For a little over a month, my students practiced a range of words. This is challenging because they must spell using the American English alphabet (for example Z= zee not zed) and they had a list of 314 words. The words ranged from easy to medium, to difficult. So you’d start with words like “Rose” and “Table”, then move onto words such as, “Socialize” and “Translation”, and eventually get to “Gerrymandering” and “Misrepresentation”.

Now I have always been a terrible speller. I remember the horrors of studying for spelling tests in first grade with my mom and feeling defeated because I genuinely couldn’t remember how to spell anything. Sometimes spell check even lets me down. But the students studied hard, and we practiced A LOT. So when it came down to the competition they were nothing but ready.

The day before our competition I travelled to Gina’s village with Randall to judge her spelling bee. It was really awesome to 1. get to see her site, and 2. get a feel for what was going to happen the next day at mine.

Friday afternoon, Sam and Gina made their way to my village to judge my competition. It went really well. One of the things we discussed was accents. Did Sam have an accent close enough to mine so the students were hearing the words similar to how I pronounce them. After a handful of months of teaching English I will say it’s always hard when I have to do pronunciation because I am made aware of my own accent. Sometimes I will say a word or phrase and you can really hear the Western New York in me, but other times I say something and it sounds very Southern Ontario. It’s where growing up on a border really hits.

I have about 9 students who will move on to the next regional competition, and from there they will compete against other village schools for places at the national competition which will be held in Prishtina sometime in the spring.

A HUGE thanks to Gina and Sam for judging, and a huge congrats to all my students who participated. If you would like to see more of what the Spelling Bee competition looked like please check out the video linked below!