Spelling Bee

Last Friday, the qualifying 2nd and 3rd graders had a practice spelling bee to get ready for the
spelling bees they hold in 4th, 5th and 6th grade. Em qualified along with 30 other kids so grandma, Josie and I went to watch. It was held in one of the classrooms and the room was packed wall-to-wall with teachers, kids and parents. Because it was a practice they had double elimination so it took awhile to whittle it down the contestants. After about an hour there were about 6 kids left and Emily was one of them along with her long time rival J.B. Emily had gotten all her words right up to that point and then missed "chemical". That was one of the words we hadn't practiced. At that point, they had run out of words from the list we had studied so they brought in the 7th grade word list. Em's next word was "postmortem". She had no idea what that even meant but she did her best but missed it. She was eliminated along with a 3rd grade boy.

There were only two boys left...a 3rd grader and "JB". These two were in a spell off for about 30 minutes and the kids, who had been sitting on the floor in a hot, crowded classroom for over an hour, were going nuts but these two kept going and going. Finally, the 3rd grader cracked and JB won the spelling bee. We thought we were done and could go home but they called Emily back in to have a spell-off for 3rd and 4th place with the boy who had been eliminated in the same round. I was really nervous! They let everyone go so there were just the teachers, Emily and her competition, and gma and I. They went back and forth for several minutes both misspelling their words so then the other person gets a chance to spell the word and then their own word and so on. Finally, the boy misspelled "mildew" and Emily got a big grin on her face. She nailed it and had to spell "celebration". That was a word that we had practiced and Emily nailed it to take 3rd place!!! Yeah Emily! We are so proud of her.

If she ever gets her certificate, I'll post a picture.