no more bedhead

Tonight was the Regional Spelling Bee.  This bee covered the four counties in our neck of the woods, and the participants were the winners of the school spelling bees from the area.  As I mentioned earlier, Beenie was one of those participants.

Sixty-nine spellers started the tournament, and Beenie was number 45, so we had to wait a while for him to spell.  In the first round, he spelled:

• metagnomy

which was pretty funny, as none of us had ever heard of that word before.  He did a fantastic job of asking for pronunciation, origin of word, sentence use, etc., and actually used those clues to determine how to spell the word.  I was impressed.

At the end of the first round, 48 spellers had been eliminated, so they started round two with 21 spellers.

Beenie's word was:

• liquefacient

another word I had never heard of.  Again, he used his questions wisely and figured out the ending correctly.  However, he didn't quite get the beginning of the word, substituting an 'i' for the 'e'.  In both the school bee and tonight, I was writing down the words as he was asked them, and I wrote down this one exactly the way he spelled it, so I would have been out, too.  It was a tricky one - do you go with "liquid" or "liquefy"?  Oh, well.

He said before the bee that his goals were to have fun, and to get through round one.  He succeeded on both counts!

So, after the second round, there were seven spellers left.  The first one spelled her word correctly, then all six others missed.  When she went to spell her "championship" word, she missed, too, so all seven spellers were brought back and the round done again.

Again, six spellers missed, and one got it correct.  When he tried the championship word, he missed.
In the next round, six spellers missed, and one got it correct.  Then he missed the championship word.
Once again, six spellers missed their words, and one got it correct.  This time, he spelled the championship word correctly and was named the winner.  The other six were declared co-runners up.

So, I say that Beenie made it to the penultimate round of the tournament, because everyone else left standing at the end of the round in which he was eliminated were named winners.

It was a great experience for Beenie, and for us.  It was a lot of fun to see it in action, and the difference in difficulty of words between the school level and regional level was noticeable.

Edit 3/7: Beenie just pointed out that I spelled a word incorrectly in this blog post.  Good start for next year!  (I fixed it.)