Monday, March 26, 2007

Levi Finishes 2nd In County Spelling Bee Due To Manure

My son Levi represented his school today in the county spelling bee. He did a great job, finishing in 2nd place overall out of 26 4th graders. Levi correctly spelled well over a dozen words, including "examples", "probably", and "graffiti" before misspelling "manure." He spelled it "manuer."

This is humorous as Levi comes from a dairy farming heritage, his grandfather worked a large dairy farm which 2 of his uncles still run.

Levi also comes from a great spelling heritage, with several uncles, aunts, and his father having participated in this same county spelling bee. One of the first, uncle Dick, missed the word "license." Levi's grandmother has made it her duty to make sure that whenever another of her kids or grandkids enter a spell-down, they know how to spell "license" if nothing else.

Likewise I made sure he would not miss the first word I ever missed in the county spelling bee, "buried." I clearly remember several other students missing it by starting with "ba" or "be" or even using a "y", but I misspelled it with 2 r's, "burried."

Levi's accomplishment today was much better than my best showing, I don't recall ever even making the top 10.

Many of the most challenging words today were compound words where the kids had to decide if it was a single word, 2 words, or a hyphenated word: "slam-dunked", "air conditioning", "flagpole", "eyesore", and "old-fashioned" were among the tricky words. The hardest word I heard was "Peace Corps" but Levi said he would have gotten that one correct.

Great job Levi!

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