Our girl can S-P-E-L-L

This month was an exciting one!  On March 4th, Annaliese was part of her school spelling team for a parochial school spelling contest here in town.  Her school had a spelling bee about a month ago where she came in 4th place.  That qualified her to be on the school team. 

To get ready to be on the school team she was given 8 pages of words to study.  Easy right?  Each page had at least 300 words on it!  That's a lot of words to study.  We did our best to get study them all but in the end we only made it through the first 6 pages.  Oh well.

The way the contest works is that there are 4 quarters lasting 15 minutes each.  Each school has 4 team members.  Each team member goes up for a quarter and competes against the other schools.  For every word that is spelled correctly the school gets a point.  If a word is misspelled then they are not out, just no point that round.

Annaliese was in the 3rd quarter.  As luck would have it the words she was given to spell were all from page 7.  Sigh.  Of course.  Not page 6 or 5 or 4, 3, 2 or 1 but 7.  BUT she did great!  She kept her cool and held her own.  I know she was nervous but nobody would have ever been able to see it.  The words from page 7 were the hardest of the entire night.  Fortunately all the words for all the spellers in her round were equally difficult. She scored enough points her round to keep her school tied for first.  After the final quarter it was still tied and our 8th grade star speller had to do a spell-off with the other school. Who knew a spelling bee could be so exciting?!  In the end our team won.  What a fun night it was. I'm so glad that Annaliese had this experience to be on the spelling team.  It was hard work to get through even just 6 pages of words but I think if she qualifies in the future she'll be motivated to push through all 8.  I couldn't be more proud of my girl!  Great job Annaliese!