Yarden's Spelling Bee
Last year, during "Hidon HaTanach" at school, we were inspired by the success of the event and we decided to create an equally exciting event for English and we came up with the idea of a spelling bee. At our very first weekly English Staff meeting of the school year we agreed it was an excellent idea and we started to search for information regarding spelling bees for EFL students.
A couple of weeks later, one of our teachers introduced the film "Akeela and the Bee". It is a very inspiring film based on a true story about a 7th grader from a center-city school who participates in the national spelling bee in the USA. We decided that showing the movie to the students would be our first step to introduce the subject to the pupils.
We began to create a plan and time frame for the Bee, which changed a few times due to school trips and vacations, but finally we set a date and ground rules according to international spelling standards, modified to accommodate our EFL learners.
After many emails, meetings and deliberations, vocabulary lists were handed out to the students according to class and level. Participants were from 7th to 9th grade, from different group levels (and even one LD student with Hatamot!) All in all, over 20 students participated in the final event. First prize was a MP3 player. Second and third, chocolate and candy.
We decided to hold the spelling bee in our sports auditorium, with all due ceremony, parents of contestants and principal present and participating. All middle school students, and teachers, were in the audience cheering on their classmates, and trying to guess the correct spelling themselves. All in all it was a fantastic two hour activity.
I believe the school staff in general, and English staff in particular all gained from this event. We were surprised by the enthusiasm expressed by the students themselves, the teachers and especially the parents. It was contagious. The students in the audience were shocked at how well the participants had studied (and by first place prize as well) and we believe that next year we will have many more candidates who will want to participate in the event. This will probably demand a more advanced screening process (this year we let all the students who wanted to participate have a chance).
One thing we realized is that time wise (a bit over two hours) we need to be more organized. We had three students tied for first place which called for extra words we hadn't prepared in advance, and cause us to run into "overtime". Some of the students in the audience found it difficult to sit for so long listening to other students spell words in English. We will take this and more into consideration planning the event for next year, which we are sure, will be an even greater success!
Click here to download the rules and procedures.
Click here to download a power point presentation.