That's My G-I-R-L!

Elizabeth participated in the school spelling bee today.  Three students from each of the fifth and sixth grade classes made the cut a few weeks ago.  Since then, she's been trying to memorize how to spell the 450 words on the spelling bee list.  The list starts out easy enough with words like tag, jam, and shy but increases in difficulty to mollify, panache, and chiffonade and ends with words like sotto voce, velociraptor, and portmanteau.  While quizzing her, sometimes I'd have to pull out my phone and use the pronunciation button on the dictionary app.  We both increased our vocabularies through studying for this event.

She was nervous onstage, but she was surprisingly not as anxious about it beforehand as I thought she would be.  We were proud of her for trying out for it, making it, and studying so hard.  She drew number one, so she was the first speller.  Here she is introducing herself in the practice round:

Her third word was pulp:

Unfortunately, she didn't make it all that far.  She missed her fourth word--partner--by omitting the n.  She knows how to spell partner and she will never misspell it again, but she didn't show her disappointment.  She took her seat, smiled, and did not cry.  At the end of the round, she left the stage and sat with her friends.  On the next round, her two other classmates were eliminated and she consoled the one who did cry.  I think I was more proud of her for her courage and compassion today than for her spelling ability.

I've never participated in a spelling bee, but I can imagine it's pretty nerve-wracking to stand on the stage and try to correctly spell aloud before six classes, teachers, the principal, and parents.  As I found out when our kids were toddlers and Brian and I would spell things we didn't want them to know about, it's not easy to spell aloud.  It takes concentration and focus.  All those kids did really well, and I loved how much their classmates rooted for them.  When the last fifth grader was eliminated, the fifth graders in the audience let out a collective "awwwww."  They were sincerely pulling for the guy.  It was a heart-warming moment.

In the end, two sixth grade girls went back and forth about five or six times before one was crowned the champion.  From what I've heard, this was one of the longest spelling bees at our school so we had some pretty good spellers up there.  Way to go, all.  Way to go, Elizabeth!