Annual Spelling Bees Held at MacArthur Elementary

The Spelling Bees at MacArthur Elementary were exciting this year! Once again, we had two Spelling Bees: one for Kindergarten and 1st graders and another for 2nd and 3rd graders. Delvin Kinser, USD 480 Board of Education President, served as our announcer for both spelling Bees. Our three judges for both Bees work at MacArthur and were Dustin Burke, IRC Para, Tami Spain, Librarian, and Linnzi Pando, 2nd and 3rd grade Para.

The top three spellers in each classroom were chosen through a classroom Spelling Bee. The top three in each class competed in a school Spelling Bee. The 2nd and 3rd grade spelling Bee took place on Thursday, February 28th in the gym at MacArthur. There were 15 participants in this Spelling Bee. After spelling words for an hour, there were four participants still in the competition. These four were then given challenge words that were not available to study in advance. Our challenge words came from the Webster’s List of Most Commonly Misspelled Words. Brady Kappelmann and Jireh Ramirez went out in the first round of challenge words and tied for 3rd place. Abbie Dowell and Jasmine Hoffman continued to spell for 25 minutes, when we declared a tie for 1st place between the two.

After rescheduling the Kindergarten and 1st grade Spelling Bee twice because of snow days, we finally got to have it on Friday, March 1st. There were 21 participants in this Bee. Again, the participants spelled for about an hour before we went to the challenge word list. The final three participants in the Bee were all 1st graders. 3rd place went to Paris Bond, 2nd place went to Zayden Martinez, and 1st place went to J. Brooks Kappelmann after spelling dollars and house correctly.