Faria Spelling Bee is generally held for 4th and 5th grade students in the Faria GLC. The top scoring 30 students in the written round advance to Faria’s Annual Spelling Bee Oral Round. All Faria students and families are welcome. 

Here are the general written round guidelines and the oral round guidelines. They may get updated every year so look out for a fresh set. 

• Think of Spelling Bee as a journey, not as a one-time competition. Help your child develop love for words!

• Encourage your child to read a lot -- both fiction and informational books which would introduce them to new words contextually.

• Here are a couple of movies that you could watch with your child to inspire them about Spelling Bee: 

           Akeelah and the Bee:     http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0437800/

            Spellbound: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spellbound_(2002_film)

•  Make sure your child studies the School Spelling Bee List (450 words) that you would have received from respective teacher. When evaluating the Written Bee papers last year we found that many students got several words from the study list wrong! In case if you've not received the list, please email spelling-bee@faria-feef.org and we will send a copy for you. 

• Once your child completes studying the 450 words in the School Spelling Bee List, he or she could study 1150 words on Merriam Webster's Spell It: http://www.myspellit.com/ 

• Once your child completes Spell It, he or she could get deeper into learning the root words from various origins such as Greek, German, Latin, Swahili, Hindi, etc. I'm attaching a pdf written by Dr. Jacques Bailly, former champion and the current official pronouncer of Scripps National Spelling Bee. I hope you'll find it useful. Also, here is a good book that could help with Spelling Bee preparation: https://www.amazon.com/Spell-Like-Champ-Barrie-Trinkle/dp/0761143696  

• And here's a brief video interview of a former Spelling Bee champion where he revealed a bit on how he studied: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQFUrNRT-9Y 

Please have your child watch a few YouTube video clips of Scripps National Spelling Bee to familiarize them on the questions they can ask before they start spelling. That approach would help them in getting the spelling right.