Spelling Bee

I helped out at a local school's invitational English spelling bee for 1st - 3rd grade on Saturday. I was their native speaker, which meant that I read the words with my "American accent". There were two other Indonesian teachers who served as judges and scorers.

The rules here are a bit different than they are in America. There were about 25 students, and each student came to the front of the room one at a time to draw three numbers. Each number corresponded to a word on the spelling list (that I held). A "helper" would open the first slip of paper and tell me the number. I would then say the corresponding word to the student. The student could then ask me to repeat it once and/or ask for a clue. For example, if the word was "kitchen", I would say, "A kitchen is a room in a house". I had to come up with the clues off the top of my head - the hardest part of the job. The student then had one chance to spell the word. If they got it right, they got 100 points, and if they spelled it incorrectly, they got 0 points. The other two ladies kept track of scoring.

We repeated this process for all three words, then that student would go and sit while the next came up. For the first round, we used words that were 5 - 8 letters. After this round, all the students were dismissed while we totaled their scores. The top 10 were called back in, and we moved on to the next round which used words up to 12 letters. The same process was repeated, and at the end, the winner was the one with the highest total score.

Indonesian is an extremely phonetic language, and so many of these English words got some interesting - but understandable - spellings! Garlic became garlac, picture became pixer, library became librery, lettuce became lates, violet became vilot, and cheese became cese (c makes a ch sound in Indonesian). Other spellings were a little more nonsensical as nerves got the best of some. Gerf was giraffe, snanace was spinach, soucsg was sausage, corthye was curtain.

Now cover up the right side of your screen and see if you can tell what the second round words on the left side are supposed to spell!

brekxdes                                                                                                                   breakfast
labbratorry                                                                                                                laboratory
feberay                                                                                                                     february
cloot                                                                                                                         balloon
labbryaian                                                                                                                 librarian
danggerous                                                                                                               dangerous
dragoi                                                                                                                       drugstore
ermchair                                                                                                                   armchair
brokoly                                                                                                                     broccoli
meadball                                                                                                                   meatball
expendfe                                                                                                                  expensive


My personal favorite was the spelling of the word "aquarium". Based on her total deer in the headlights look, I was pretty sure that the poor girl had NEVER heard this word before. She asked me to repeat it, which I did. Then she asked for her clue. I was stumped for a second, but then I said, "An aquarium is a type of glass box that fish live in". Still stumped, she asked me to repeat the clue, which I did.  I'm pretty sure all she understood from my clue was "fish live in". Because then she confidently and quickly spelled, "W-A-T-E-R".