Spelling Competition 2019

The last four weeks we have been putting on Spelling Competitions at the school.  Every Thursday during the normal “debate” time, which is never an actual debate but instead a time when students have to speak at the front of the class to recite something they have learned, we have been going class by class with the competition. 

 

Ester is the letter champion for the Baby class

As you can imagine, the Baby and Middle preschool classes was not so much about spelling as inclusion with the rest of the school.  We had them come up to blackboard and write letters.  After we went through the alphabet, we gave them simple words they see regularly like “cow” but allow their teacher to coach them through the process.  In the end their level of competition is more about who can follow instructions in a timely fashion than the actual ability to spell. 

Eugene is the letters champion for the Middle preschool class

The first real level of spelling words on their own comes with the pre-unity preschool class.  They did get some help from the teachers despite many warnings to stop.  In the end they did ok though I think the student who won could have gone a lot further than any of the others in the class.

Elisha is our Pre-unity spelling champion. 

Now we are to the real competition with our Standard 1 and Standard 2 students.  The winners were not a big surprise.  Nice for Standard 1 and Gladness for Standard 2.  What was a big surprise was the crying for those who did not win and the cheating by the teachers.   I gave them a list of words to see if any were things we needed to strike off because they may not learn those specific words due to cultural differences.  Instead the teachers copied the list and taught the kids the words.  So, they tried to make it more of a competition of memorization than the ability to actually spell.

Nice was the Standard 1 Spelling Champion

Unfortunately, most of the school system here is about memorization than understanding concepts.  For example, they teach them certain words and their plural instead of teaching the rules of plural spelling.  I spent a lot of time creating a PowerPoint presentation for showing on the TV that taught the rules of spelling plural words.  I am still teaching it to the teachers.

Nice's winning word

So, the crying in the competition came from the fact that I knew what the teachers were doing, and I changed words on the list.  Simple things like changing branch to branches and the like.  I wanted the kids who were learning how to hear the words and understand how the sounds work to create the spelling of a word they have not seen before would rise to the top and not those that could simply memorize things.  

I did enact the you have to be able to spell the word the last one missed when we got down to two students.  That way you could not win on the other student just getting a word that was too hard like hippopotamus.

Gladness was our Standard 2 spelling champion

In the end the competition was a success in my mind, because the students who went past 4 rounds were those that were trying to listen, and spell words based off their sounds and not simply memorizing what had been on the blackboard before.  Those are the kids learning concepts.  The reason it is a success in my mind is that we had quite a few more that showed they understood concepts the teachers don’t yet understand than I thought we had.  It gives me great hope for our future.