A Bunch of Balderdash

When Kaedon won his school spelling bee, he was invited to participate in our school district's preliminary spelling bee.  All the top three winners from each school in the county were invited to participate, so there were about 155 kids there.  We were given a list of words and their county of origin, along with a guide for each language.  In all, there were over 500 words, some easy and some quite hard!  We did our best to make it through each list and learn spelling, origin, etc while trying to keep in mind that Kaedon is still only in 4th grade and would rather be playing at any given moment than learning new spelling words.  Some of the harder words were: schadenfreude (happiness in someone else's misery), uitlander (pronounced ate- lander), schottische, mnemonic....whew!  I had fun learning about the word origins as well.  It was quite fun.  Kaedon started to get burned out, though.

He was pretty nervous at the preliminary bee, but he stayed calm and did great.  He made it into the top 30, which qualified him to move on to the county bee, which included the winners from the 7th and 8th grade junior high students.  He was pretty thrilled when a reporter from the small local paper asked him some questions afterward and he was quoted in the paper.  He was the only 4th grader and only 9 year-old to make it in the top thirty.  We were proud of his preparation.

In the county bee, we had the same list to draw from, but they could also draw words randomly out of the dictionary.  I was pretty amazed at all the smart kids there, but in the end it seemed to come down to preparation.  We were just happy that Kaedon had made it that far and didn't have any expectations for the night.  That said, each time he stepped up to the mic I would get butterflies for him!  Especially when the pronouncer started having troubles pronouncing the words and mis-pronounced his word, which was "tuckahoe" (she said "teck-a-hoe").  Luckily, since we'd studied that word, he asked her if she really meant ____ and she said yes, thank you for correcting me.  He laughed and said "you're welcome" and the whole audience laughed.  He made it to the final nine (they never did get to the hardest of the language-derived words), when they started drawing random tricky words from the dictionary.  Six kids, including him, were eliminated that round on words like "thoracic" ( pronounced thorassic), stanchion, and his word-- ballyhooed  (he asked for the language of origin and they said "unknown.").   It was sure fun to watch some of these kids.  The kid who won the whole thing was sitting next to him and told him it was his 3rd or 4th bee.   (the tall kid standing behind him in the first picture)

If Kaedon never does it again, it sure was fun at least once to get so far and to learn some new words, meanings, etc.   He had made a deal with me about getting extra computer time if he made it into the top 15, 10, or 5.  At one point, I saw him turned around, counting silently but not very subtly how many kids were left and nodding his head as he counted each one.  Funny how how little one cares about schadenfreude when contemplating a little extra "Poptropica."

 
This became a fun event for grandparents and even an aunt, uncle, and cousins who showed up!