Mid North Island Regional Spelling Bee Champion Crowned

Dan Sneddon from Hamilton’s Fairfield Intermediate won the 2011/2012 NZ Vegemite Spelling Bee Mid North Island regional competition last night.

Dan will be studying hard now for the Spelling Bee final based in Wellington in February 2012. He will be up against other regional champs vying for the title of 2012 New Zealand Vegemite Spelling Bee Champion.

Dan correctly spelt the word “malicious” in the final round against Edie Thomas from Taranaki’s Kaponga Primary School. Edie misspelled ‘suffrage’ while Jessica Needham from Maeroa Intermediate took third place after stumbling on ‘erosion’.

Second place winner Edie has also won a place in the final of the NZ Vegemite Spelling Bee.
Whoever wins the 2012 final will be crowned New Zealand’s Vegemite Spelling Bee Champion and wins a trip to the US, representing New Zealand at the spelling Olympics - the 85th Scripps National Spelling Bee in Maryland.

This will be the eighth time New Zealand has been represented at the US final, which started in 1925, and is America’s biggest and longest-running academic competition. The competition attracts more than eleven million competitors hopeful of winning a place in the championship final.

New Zealand’s best spellers are taken from a pool of Year 8 students from across the country.
Event manager Janet Lucas says the Spelling Bee is nerve-wracking and exciting for competitors and audience alike.

“The Spelling Bee never fails to surprise. It is a fantastic opportunity for the contestants to enhance their language skills, learn new meanings of words, set study goals and have fun. We’ve had some great competitors, who have put hours of study into preparing for this competition.”

The New Zealand Vegemite Spelling Bee, sponsored by Kraft’s Vegemite, is administered by a charitable trust. Its purpose is to help students improve their spelling, increase their vocabularies, learn concepts and develop correct English usage.

www.spellingbee.co.nz

Spelling Bee Fun Facts

• The Scripps National Spelling Bee was first broadcast on network television in 1946.
• The most frequent word on the Scripps National Spelling Bee word lists has been the French, "connoisseur".
• Participation in the bee is up 74 percent since the mid 1980s when spell-check usage became widespread.
• Jody-Anne Maxwell of Jamaica, in 1998, was the first contestant from outside the United States to win.
• The official dictionary for the Scripps National Spelling Bee is the Webster's Third New International Dictionary that contains more than 472,000 word entries, counting its addenda.