Tough competition marks lower-grades bee

CHINLE

While the Scripps National Spelling Bee is only for fourth- through eight-graders, Chinle Diné Youth has for years held a bee for the lower grades, just for fun and to help them be more prepared for the real bee when they age into it.

While it’s undoubtedly a good thing for the kids, it’s usually a bit of a yawner for the spectators. The kids drop like flies in the first three or four rounds, leaving two or three word nerds to duke it out. It’s usually over in an hour.

Not this year.

Who knows what was in the air, or perhaps with the advent of the new Denny’s, Chinle kids are eating better breakfasts. Whatever the case, there was some real competition last Thursday.

Eight children lasted into the 10th round, which is pretty much unheard of, and remained in the competition until the 15th, when nerves got the better of two very strong contenders.

Aliyah Villarama from Mesa View Elementary, who had spelled many harder words, had a tongue-trip on “secret.” She started it “s, c …” then immediately realized her mistake and asked if she could start over. You can, but, unfortunately, you can’t change the order of the letters from your first attempt, so after looking like she could have taken the whole thing, she was out.

Similarly, Kenneth Tso from Chinle Elementary spelled too fast and left the “r” out of “shrink.”

It wasn’t until Round 17 that the field was cleared of all but the five best spellers — Maria Brown of Chinle Elementary, Payton Tacheene of Piñon, Kaylee McCabe and Hannah Benally of Many Farms, and Johnny Yazzie of Canyon de Chelly. (That’s another thing about this year’s bee: All the schools seemed pretty evenly matched.)

The five duked it out through the entire third-grade word list and well into the fourth-grade list when Benally bowed before “sultan” and Yazzie muddied “brackish” with an extra “r”.

The fifth-grade words, however, proved too much of a challenge for Tacheene, who hadn’t studied that high and didn’t pass “evaluate,” replacing the first “e” with an “i.”

Brown got a “mandate” to win the bee.

But it was a fine showing indeed and nobody in the whole bunch should be embarrassed. Hopefully we’ll see them all next year, when we can evaluate them again.

---