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player ready...“Your word is a verb,” the official pronouncer said. “To cook in a liquid kept just below the boiling point.”
The student answered: “P-O-A-C-H.”
The question of whether you’re smarter than a fourth grader was answered this week at the Elmwood Park Community Unit School District 401 spelling bee, a lead-up event to the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
Nineteen top students from the district’s middle and two elementary schools bravely took the stage at Elmwood School Feb. 10, many of them asking definitions before attempting to spell some difficult words.
“Your word is a noun,” Frank Kuzniewski said. “It is a walk or path between two roads of formally planted trees or shrubs that are at least twice as high as the width of the walk or path.”
Leaning close to the microphone, the student spelled: “A-L-L-E-E.”
“That is correct.”
With about 50 parents and family members watching from the gymnasium bleachers, students correctly spelled difficult words like chaplain, kimchi, rhetorical and congealing.
By the 14th pass, spellers had erred on words such as contorted, granules, vibrant, basically and ogre.
It boiled down to a duel between two spellers, Elmwood School fourth grader Erhan Mulvihill and Mel Rubio, an Elm Middle School seventh grade student.
The boys nervously spelled word after word, back and forth, over the course of the next half hour.
“To force or push out of the way, as if by using a tractor-driven machine having a broad horizontal blade.”
“B-U-L-L-D-O-Z-E,” Mulvihill correctly answered.
“Your word is an adjective,” Rubio was told. “Like, characteristic of, or relating to animals, as opposed to human beings.”
The seventh grader then spelled: “B-E-A-S-T-L-Y.”
Following an endurance volley 30 successive rounds of words, Rubio then was asked to spell “inkling.”
“I-N-C-L-I-N-G,” was his answer, which produced a collective groan that echoed silently throughout the gym.
Mulvihill then correctly spelled “conflict,” and the bee had its winner.
In addition to a high school with 987 students, District 401 consists of John Mills Elementary, which has 658 pre-kindergarten through fifth grade students; Elmwood Elementary, with 494 children in grades kindergarten through fifth; and 667 sixth, seventh and eighth graders at Elm Middle School.
“We started with a pre-test of 20 words,” Elmwood Principal Matt Lerner said. “The best seven scores from each of the schools determine which students will be part of the bee. There were two withdrawals, so we’ve got 19 competing.”
“This event is a return to normalcy for the kids,” Elmwood Assistant Principal Stephanie Hagins said. “It had been an annual event that was canceled last year due to the pandemic, so we’re really excited to bring it back this year.”
On hand to observe the event and present the trophy was District 401 Superintendent of Schools Leah Gauthier.
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“We’re so proud and excited after having to take a hiatus last year,” she said. “It’s great to have all the families here to appreciate the work that our kids have been doing.”
Mulvihill will compete in the West Suburban Cook County Bee on March 7.
There will be 230 regional spelling bee winners from across the country meeting for preliminaries, quarterfinals, semifinals and the chance to compete in the Scripps National Spelling Bee finals, to be held on June 2 in National Harbor, Maryland, broadcast on live television and hosted by actor LeVar Burton.
“I’m very excited to get to the next round,” the 10-year-old Mulvihill said. “I think learning how to spell is going to help me in life and be really useful for a lot of different things.”
