GREENFIELD — A hush fell over the crowd with every new round.
One by one, the moderator read out the words — “hazelnut,” then “educator,” then “lovable” — and the students went to work.
Some 6,000 fourth- to sixth-graders, gathering at a dozen schools across the state, participated in spell bowl contests at the end of last week, sponsored by the Indiana Association of School Principals.
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Click here to purchase photos from this galleryFourteen teams of students — nearly half of them made up of Hancock County children — visited Greenfield Intermediate School on Friday for their competition. Parents packed into the bleachers in the school’s gymnasium while the spellers took seats in folding chairs on the gym floor, the contestants marching up to a table where they’d take their test next to an adult proctor as their teammates sat nearby and watched.
The Hancock County schools to participate in Friday’s contest were Maxwell Intermediate School, Greenfield Intermediate School, Eastern Hancock Middle School, New Palestine Middle School and New Palestine Intermediate School.
Results for the contest were still being finalized Monday and were not available at press time, according to the Indiana Association of School Principals website.
The rules of the contest were simple, said Karen Edwards, a Greenfield-Central teacher who served as moderator for the event.
Each round, a pupil would slide into the hot seat, pick up his or her pencil and have a chance to spell seven words — a small fraction of the 750 words they learned before heading for the competition — before the buzzer sounded, signaling the end of the 20 seconds they had to give each word a try.
Audience members were given sheets of lined paper so that they could play along if they chose to.
There are no individual scores in spell bowl; only individuals that contributed to a team score, Edwards told the crowd. On the north end of the gym, volunteer students keep a tally of their school’s progress.
If a student got an answer right, they often raised their hand in the air to show their classmates their progress. Ribbons were handed out at the end of each round to those who earned perfect scores by spelling all seven of their words correctly.
Juliana McDonald and Julia Lenahan, fifth-grade students at New Palestine Intermediate School, said they’ve spent most of the fall preparing for this competition, attending twice-weekly practices to take spelling tests with their friends.
Some words on their list were certainly more challenging than others, and there were a few their team wasn’t able practice before Friday’s competition, the girls said. Still, they were feeling pretty confident before the first round began.
Evan Pangburn, a fifth-grader from Greenfield Intermediate School, said he, too, hadn’t had a chance to practice every word because there were just too many to memorize.
Evan joined spell bowl because be liked reading and spelling more than math, he said. He didn’t mind the extra hours of studying that’s required. In fact, like Juliana and Julia, he found it fun.
Evan wasn’t worried about the difficult words. He’d spelled “spelunking” correctly during a recent practice, and that had given him a boost of assurance, he said.
But, he said, if the moderator didn’t call out “Chesapeake Bay” during his turn, he’d be OK with that.