Yesterday, I co-organised the Preliminary Round of the Spelling Bee during assembly in my school.
In the midst of the frenetic and frantic preparation, I failed to take into account one pivotal thing: audience engagement. The 13-and-14-year-old students spelt the words, and understandably, some of them were a bit slow in finalising their responses. This led to an awkward silence, which I’m personally comfortable with but might not go down as well with boisterous teenagers.
In any case, I survived the Preliminary Round, so it’s up to me to pick up the pieces and glue them together for next week. This is my battle plan.
Before the Spelling Bee
- Recruit 3 teacher volunteers
During the Spelling Bee
- After getting the students to spell the 3rd word, announce a hiatus. Invite one teacher volunteer to sit on the Hot Seat near the stage, commanding attention over the audience.
- Ask the teacher to pick a student. Student tribute to come forward.
- Both the teacher and student will be given a whiteboard. A student emcee will announce a word.
- The faster individual to spell the word correctly will get a souvenir (an old Spelling Bee collar pin) as well as bragging rights.
- Repeat Steps 1-4 after getting the students to spell the 6th and 10th words.
- To ensure the authenticity of this fringe activity, it would be ideal if we could find 3 sporting teachers who don’t know the words beforehand.
- Incidentally, these are the three words: grateful, dedication and performance. They each have a short word within them: ate, cat and form. We can reinforce the word-within-a-word trick for the entire school.
I sure hope this works!