Manpower is lean this year, so I thought of a truncated version of Spelling Bee. š
Hereās how it can unfold.
Preliminary Round
- Just have one round before the finals
- Divide the cohort into two groups. Lower secondary students move to Indoor Sports Hall, whereas upper secondary students report to the Multipurpose Hall
- Use a Reading Tuesday slot to conduct the preliminary round.
- Mass participation - every student is given a piece of paper and asked to spell commonly used words
- Can use Speechify to read aloud the words.
- I suggest 15 words to be announced in increasing order of difficulty. This is to provide low-hanging fruit for the weakest students to attempt spelling. To mitigate the need for crowd control when the words are too hard and some pockets of students create a stir.
- I suggest that the base words be kept consistent for both groups. However, the words used for the upper level will be more tricky because of the greater number of affixes attached
| Lower | Upper |
|---|---|
| recycle | recyclables |
| impossible | possibilities |
| motivated | motivational |
| excited | excitement |
- Words 13-15 must be stretch words so that we donāt have a situation of too many students scoring full marks
- Form teachers collect the papers. To be used next Tuesday assembly.
Week after Preliminary Round
- Spelling Bee team prepares a deck of slides to be used by Form Teachers.
- The slides comprise the 15 words that are presented via syllabication
- Explain that we want students to learn the spelling rules used by good spellers to spell the words
- Students mark their classmateās work
- Scores are tallied. Form teachers take note of names of two students with the highest scores.
- The English level coordinator collates the scores and decides the top four classes to compete in the finals.
Finals
- Trim it to 30 minutes (1 period)
- Make the Spelling Bee mascot walk around to generate hype. Some students will go crazy
- Start the Junior Round
- Have the 4 Year 1 and 4 Year 2 class participants sit in one straight line in two separate rounds. Give each pair a mini whiteboard. No need to use the Socratic app.
- Announce the first word. Participants write it on the whiteboard. At the emceeās bidding, they will reveal their answer in front of the audience
- Keep the first 5 words easy peasy so that the round wonāt end too soon
- When a pair misspells a word, their class is automatically knocked out. They will be asked to leave the stage. Audience must be briefed not to boo losing contestants
- This knockout process continues until we have a champion class for each level
- Rinse and repeat for Senior Round
- Prizes and badges and certificates to be given to contestants another time.