Spelling bee!

On January 24th, I went to the local Home Educator's Network spelling bee. My age group was the 5th-8th graders. While I was spelling, Daddy wrote a commentary on all the words I spelled (except for the first few.) At the end of the day, I went home with a silver medal, and a chance to move on to the Douglas County Spelling Bee. At first, I thought I would definitely want to move on, but I had less than a month to prepare, which is not very long to study hundreds of words. Together my parents and I decided to let the girl who came in third place have a chance. I will have two more years in which to try, before I am too old.

A big thanks to Grandma, Mommy, Daddy, and Pastor Jon for helping me study!

Here's Daddy's commentary:

This is the list of words that Katie spelled. 

Words with an X to the right are words that I missed when trying to spell them. 

• Theater
• Joust
• Gorgon. X 
• Quaver. X 
• Turmoil (while a dude in the audience hacked up a lung midway through her spelling)
• Disarray. (Same dude.  Same hacking. He'd best find a cough drop or I'm going to put a permanent stop to the hacking and coughing). 
  • Manufacture  (no coughing this time)
  • Lanai. X (I have no clue what this word is or means)
  • Stridency  (yeah - this one made me nervous) 
  • Bulbous (Liz chuckled - almost out loud - because she and Katie joked about this word all the time)
  • Extinguish  (she's on fire!!!) 
  • Wheedle. X (sentence: Katie thought she could wheedle some more money out of her father)
  • Verdure. X. (I missed this one and I tested her on it) 
  • Panache (she nailed this one with panache!!)
  • Prognosticate (I "had a feeling" she would get this one right) 
  • Monochrome (spelled it as plain as black and white) Liz just told me that I'm a dork. 
  • Tomahawk (this is one of Katie's favorite words on the list!)
  • Ragamuffin. X (having a 2 year old brother helps with understanding this word) 
  • Chancellor  
  • Plagiarism (paused for a moment but took her time on the g-i-a part. Good job)
  • Bonsai.  X.  (How can this word NOT have a Z in it?)
  • Aficionado. X. (I'm not a fan of this word!)
  • Bazooka.  (Wow. Bulbous, tomahawk, AND bazooka ?? Sweet!  We are having fun no matter what happens!!)
  • Matriculation  (she moves on to the next word by spelling this one right) 
  • Unctuous.  X. (Why don't we use Xs when we can??  Seriously, people. Use an X instead of ct)
  • Seraphic (spelled properly by my little angel!)
  • Portmanteau. X (this is where we go home. Holy dictionaries!!!  Katie got this right!!!   Wow.)
• Final round!!!!  Top two!! 
  • Ventriloquy  (mispoke then corrected it, but can't correct herself, so this was her last word. )
• So proud of my little girl and her diligent mother!!