Spring Branch ISD Featured News

Getting ready for the Bee

February 7, 2025 8:00 AM

Ready, set, spell!

A record number of top spellers, already spelling bee winners at their elementary and middle schools in Spring Branch ISD (SBISD), are preparing for the district’s spelling bee on Feb. 13.

The efforts of the 56 school-level winners are part of the Scripps National Spelling Bee®, an organization celebrating its 100th birthday this year. Each year, thousands of students across the country compete with hopes of reaching the national competition, which is televised. The cash prize for the national spelling champion is $50,000.

This year in SBISD, the spelling bee program organizer, Roberta Smiley, is a former national spelling bee participant. She has provided Zoom sessions with spelling strategies and practice for the contenders to prepare for the upcoming district bee. She finds the Zoom sessions especially helpful for students who are shy about competing in public.

Little Puzzles

Smiley helps students see words as little puzzles that can be solved with techniques such as recognizing and spelling prefixes and suffixes, which she calls a “superpower.” She also coaches them to use the meaning of a word as a clue to how it is spelled.

She especially enjoys seeing students apply these strategies to spelling words they don’t know. “It’s like a shot of adrenaline for me,” Smiley said.

One student who employs these strategies is the 2025 Spring Forest Middle School (SFMS) spelling bee winner, sixth grader Amelia Rayner.

“My approach to an unusual word is to listen to see if I hear any root words that I know,” she said. “I can ask for the definition, and I can think of the most likely prefix or suffix to go with that word.”

Rayner’s advice to other spellers is to take time and focus when asked to spell a word within a time limit. Last year, she got flustered when presented with the word poisonous.

“I forgot the ‘s’ and then realized I messed up,” she said. “I was in such a rush to finish that I didn’t even think about the rest of the word.”

‘I Did My Best’

“I felt extremely proud of myself because it was a monumental moment in my time here in SBISD,” fifth grader Lorenzo Roman said of his win at the Edgewood Elementary (EWE) bee. “I won because I did my best in school, which got me into the spelling bee.”

He is using the free Word Club app from the Scripps National Spelling Bee®, as well as practicing with family members to get ready for the district bee.

During competitions, a strategy Roman uses when unsure of a spelling is to “ask for the definition and for the word to be used in a sentence so I can understand it better.”

As a result of her win at SFMS, Rayner has more confidence to prepare for and compete in the district spelling bee.

“Now, I’m not really worried if I mess up on anything because I’ve already made it way further than I expected,” she said. “So, I’m just studying the hardest words from the school bee.”