Heaven Will Be an Eternal Game of Bananagrams

 

There's this unschooling tactic called "strewing" that I started to follow when the kids were little. Basically, if there's a material you'd like a kid to explore, you don't hand it to the kid, or direct the kid to it--instead, you just leave it temptingly out on a shelf or a table for them to discover for themselves. And it's supposed to be okay if it takes days, weeks, even months for them to pick up that material, because when they do, it will be self-directed and self-motivated, and following their interests is how kids best learn.

Until I really discovered the true dimensions of our local university's library (Hint: filtering for Three-Dimensional, Mixed-Media gets you all the puzzles and toys and manipulatives!), this was mostly just a way for me to waste my homeschool budget on stuff the kids didn't touch. I mean, sure, they became obsessed with the Geomags and the Kapla blocks, eventually they spent entire weeks with the Perler beads and the Sculpey clay, listened to so many books on cassette tapes that I worried they would never do anything else, but the 3D pen? Nope. Nope to the Zometools for free play. Nope to the crystal growing set and the build-your-own maze set and the Snap Circuits and the Turing Tumble and the balloon animals kit and probably over a thousand dollars more of awesome kid crap over the years that I would have given a year off my life to have played with when I was their ages, ahem.

Anyway, became much cheaper to strew when what I strewed came from my local university's library, and since then, over the years, we've had logic puzzles and board games and STEM toys and math manipulatives and scientific instruments all enticingly placed on our family room bookshelves ready to be explored and easy to return.

Thanks to the library's infinite renewals, I can't even tell you how long we've had Bananagrams. I think we got it around the time we also got the giant poster of the Greek mythology family tree and the giant map of the Moon, and those have both gone back to the library, but Senet and the leaf identification kit are also still here, so maybe it hasn't been too ridiculously long. Although I'm pretty sure several sets of tessellation puzzles have come and gone in that time, as have the Proofs of Pythagoras kit and the French vocabulary flash cards, sooo...

Now that the kids are grown or nearly grown, though, it turns out that the person I'm maybe actually strewing for is myself. I was wandering around the family room the other day, aimlessly tidying while the teenager and I listened to The Haunting of Hill House (it's not translating as well as I'd hoped to audiobook; we're going to finish it, but we don't love it, whereas I LOVED this book when I read it a couple of Halloweens ago), when I noticed, for the first time in ages, the Bananagrams game sitting on the shelves where we keep our library materials, and thought, "Huh. I should play that and see if it's fun."

So I rallied the teenager, and we did play it:

And it IS fun!

You know how Scrabble is generally really fun, but it's also boring waiting for other people to take their turns, and it's terrible when you have a terrific plan for an awesome word to play but before you can do it another person takes your spot?

Bananagrams solves ALL of that. There is never any downtime. You make your own crossword grid that's all for you, so nobody can ever mess it up, and when you see a better play you can rearrange your own crossword however you like:

Teenager peeled an "I" and decided to turn "DOPE" and "DAMN" into "DOPAMINE." 

So, everyone draws the same number of letter tiles (every time I've played it's been with 2 or 3 players, and we always draw 21 tiles), and you each work on your own individual crossword grid.

Matt, our college student home for Fall Break, and I are playing at the kitchen table on a Saturday night, listening to the drive-in's broadcast of the Taylor Swift concert like a good old-timey family.

When you've all of your own letters in your own crossword, you say "Peel," and everyone takes a new tile from the pile and continues playing.

Sometimes you get a new tile and it's like an S or something, so you can just pop it onto the end of a noun. But sometimes you get a Q and you realize that your only U is already busy, so you have to disassemble half your grid to get it back and then figure out how to rebuild while continuing to take a new tile every time someone else says "Peel."

The game continues that way, with occasional breaks to look weird words up as a family or neg someone else's word choice or lore dump about Scrabble games of old, etc., until there are fewer tiles left in the pile than there are players. At that point, we declare that the next person to use up all their letters wins, and then we get in everyone else's business to "help" them finish their own crosswords, but you could also go by Scrabble points.

I think you could also play Bananagrams as a solitaire game, going by how much fun the teenager and I had one time simply turning all our tiles face-up and using them all to make one giant grid. We started off just trying to build the most emotionally unhealthy words we could, as a "joke," so maybe it's also a little bit therapeutic, as well!

Or you could just build words representing the biggest thing on your mind these days...

I'm now officially on thrift store/garage sale lookout for a set of my very own, although I'm also toying with the idea of DIYing a set. They're literally just letter tiles in a zippered bag, and the only requirements are that the letter tiles have enough chonk to be able to pick them up easily, and that they have two sides for facing them up or down.

I think it would be fun to take a set of blank wooden tiles and handpaint each one, maybe with little background decorations like an illuminated manuscript. Think how pretty your crossword grid would be!

Homeschool High School: Creative Writing and Creative Connections

Syd is studying and practicing creative writing more intensely this year, and we are having a LOT of fun with it. Creative writing with a high school student is now officially one of my Top Five subjects from our entire homeschool history together.

In keeping with my tradition of using one textbook as a spine, supplemented heavily, this is our Creative Writing spine:

• Imaginative Writing

Syd completes the daily 10-minute freewrite taught in this book each school day, although she likes to use it for different purposes than the "automatic writing" that Gertrude Stein devised. Currently, I think she's writing a serialized story in her daily 10-minute bursts, a high-interest, low-stakes challenge that's perfect for this study.

Weekly, Syd reads, records, and writes a few sentences of review of at least one novel, one short story, and one poem. I'd originally had high hopes that I could steer her towards some canonical works of my own choosing (will I never have a child who finishes a MENSA reading list?!?), but Syd prefers to make her own choices, which is, of course, better since her choices can fit her interests and aid her engagement and interest. Since she happily completes these assignments every week, I will not protest!

Syd is also working her way through Wordly Wise Book 12 this year, because an extensive vocabulary is the best tool you can have in your creative writing toolbox. This is the last book in the Wordly Wise series, gasp!, so I'll have to think of something new for spelling/vocabulary next year, because I simply cannot have a homeschool that does not include spelling/vocabulary acquisition.

My favorite parts of this Creative Writing study, though, are when we come together to write, play, and make creative connections. While I don't do formal, "school"-style lessons, I like each of our meet-ups to have a warm-up activity, a writing activity that we do together, and a writing activity, ideally inspired by our lesson, that Syd can work on in her own time and turn in later.

Six Degrees of Wikipedia is an uninspired title for a super-fun game that we sometimes play for a warm-up activity. It comes from Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, which Matt and I like to play, and of course from Six Degrees of Separation. 

To play Six Degrees of Wikipedia, you pick your starting point and your ending point, both as random as possible. The other day, Syd and I started with "Walt Disney," and wanted to end with "apricot." So we both went to the Wikipedia page for Walt Disney, then using only the blue links, we tried to get to "apricot." As we went, we wrote down every link we clicked on so we could follow our path later.

We both got from Walt Disney to apricots, but the path that each of us took was completely different. I went from the link to California, then through California's produce exports, then through types of fruit. Syd went through some animation links to get to colors to apricot the color to apricot the fruit.

The lesson, of course, is that there is more than one path from A to B, and the practice is in opening your mind to making creative connections to get you down that path. 

Another creative thinking warm-up activity that we like is Dictionary Definitions (titling is not my strong suit). We each take a dictionary (every home needs multiple dictionaries!), and put five or so abstract terms on index cards, one term per card. Next, we lay them all face-up so we can both see them, and we spend a few minutes writing vividly imagined non-definitions for some of the terms. The "definition" should be a vivid image that defines the term without literally defining the term--think along the lines of "tell me the definition without telling me the definition."

When we've both got a few definitions, we trade cards, and the other person has to try to match our definitions to the correct terms. It's almost always possible! Here are some of my recent favorites:

Syd's definitions are always the funniest.

Our "lesson" the first day we did the Dictionary Definitions warm-up was actually a comparison/contrast of vivid imagery vs. concrete details. We traded these picture books that have vivid imagery back and forth (pro tip: picture books are SO GREAT for illustrating key literary terms and writing concepts without having to devote a ton of time to reading!):

• The Black Book of Colors
• Firebird
• Magnificent Homespun Brown

In each of these books, the author uses vivid imagery in place of concrete details. The Black Book of Colors is particularly interesting because it actually does use concrete details, but it uses them AS vivid imagery to explain an abstract concept.

Next, we read Dreamers, which uses vivid imagery to tell a story. The imagery works well to signal sensory overwhelm and to make scenarios that might ordinarily feel familiar instead feel abstract and foreign. 

The special thing about Dreamers, however, is that there's an author's note afterwards in which the author tells the same story plainly, with concrete details. She couldn't have created a better contrast if she was writing this book solely to my specifications for this lesson!

The activity lent itself perfectly to an assignment asking Syd to write a story two ways, one with primarily vivid, abstract imagery rather than concrete details, and one with primarily concrete details rather than vivid, abstract imagery.

On another day, we talked about writing prompts and how to use them creatively. There are tons of books whose primary purpose is to provide writing prompts and creative writing exercises. Good academic choices are 59 Reasons to Write and What If?, but there are so many highly accessible, open-and-go choices, as well:

• Rip the Page!
• Amazing Story Generator
• Leap Write In!

Of these, Syd and I have had the most fun using the Amazing Story Generator for timed writing exercises. We each generate a story prompt, then spend ten or so minutes just riffing on it. Then we trade and read each other's brilliant pieces!

Inspired by the Amazing Story Generator, Syd made her own writing prompt creator. Here are a couple of my favorite randomly-generated prompts:

I mean, don't you want to read both of those stories?!?

So far, we're happily invested in all kinds of short story writing, but my goal is to drop everything for NaNoWriMo, and then perhaps try our hands at some poetry. Syd doesn't like either of these ideas nearly as much as I do, though, so if I can't convince her, there's nothing wrong with a full year of short stories!

Work Plans for the Week of October 6, 2014: Fall Break (for the other Kids)

Here's the link to this week's work plans.

MONDAY: The public schools in our district have a week-long fall break this week, which means that lots of local places are offering school-age programming. Yay! On this day, I actually sent the kids away to the day camp that our local parks and recreation department offers. It's your pretty basic, run-of-the-mill day camp, but the counselors are all college students who seem to have endless amounts of patience and enthusiasm, and it's based in an elementary school, so the kids eat in the cafeteria and play on the playground, stand in line, wait their turn, etc. They also go on field trips, play group games, complete bizarre craft projects, and do just about a million other things between the hours of 8 and 5. I absolutely count this as a school day.

TUESDAY: Today was a little more hectic than it appears, since we spent much of the morning at the free morning of a HUGE book sale that our local chapter of the Red Cross does ever year. Seriously, it's an Event! And there are so many books there--like, two warehouse's worth--that even on the free morning, there are fabulous books that have just been... overlooked. This morning I found, among many other wonderful treasures, four volumes of the A History of US set that I've been using as a US history spine. I mean, seriously yay!

Considering that there was also a magic/juggling/ventriloquism show at the library that the kids were practically vibrating with excitement about, I purposefully made the schoolwork for this day more efficient than usual. The older kid is still practicing long division in Math Mammoth--she keeps putting the second digit of the quotient in the wrong place, then shouting "I don't understand this!"--and the younger kid, thanks to the fact that I forced her to memorize her multiplication facts last year since I was already bullying the older kid through them, is breezing through her multiplication unit, also in Math Mammoth.

We didn't have internet at home on Tuesday, so the kids didn't actually do their Spelling City, but they did both do an excellent job copying their spelling words into cursive--the kids practice spelling every day as part of their memory work, but spelling words also make for good cursive practice.

The younger kid worked more on her City of Rocks Junior Ranger badge, and may have finished it. The older kid spent that whole time being pissed off at long division, so she'll work on her Redwoods State and National Parks Junior Ranger badge another time.

The older kid did take a break from long division so that we could all read the farming chapter from Ancient China, then the younger kid set up our mini rice farm in a bucket. That night, we went to our natural foods co-op for their freshest, wholest-looking rice, and then the older kid planted it! The kids are memorizing the dates of early farming in Ancient China (aproximately 8000-2205 BCE, if you're curious), to go along with this. I've really loved this study of Ancient China through the lens of its artifacts, by the way--perfect combo of history, timeline memorization, and hands-on projects!

WEDNESDAY: We woke up at 6:00 am to bundle up, drag a bunch of blankets over to the drive-in, and lay and watch the lunar eclipse--we also saw two meteors, two artificial satellites, and many, many constellations! I've been waiting for years for the kids to show enough interest in astronomy to support a science unit; since we've also got a partial solar eclipse in our area in a couple of weeks, it may be time to finish up paleontology and jump on astronomy while it's hot!

Our current Girl Scout Co-op unit is Dance, and another mom is having the kids over on this morning to learn historical fad dances. Can you imagine anything any more fun than that? I'm pretty excited to see what they'll cover.

We've finished our Oregon Trail/pioneer history unit, but there are still a dozen or so library books on our shelves. It's mostly housecleaning to have the kids look through that remainder, but I know that they'll enjoy the chance to just lounge about and read and call it school.

THURSDAY: For years, I've wanted to show the kids how amazing it is to simply fill a pumpkin with potting soil, water it, and then watch the pumpkin seeds sprout. I don't know if it'll actually work at this time of year, or if I'll just be hosting a moldy, dirt-filled pumpkin on top of my chest freezer, but we'll see, I suppose! It makes a fun little segue so that we can briefly review some botany, anyway--I've got a Girl Scout Co-op unit on Flowers to arrange in just a couple of weeks!

God, I'm starting to hate First Language Lessons. I think I'm just going to skip the rest of the MANY chapters on the uses of adverbs--seriously, the kids get it!--and see if that makes me want to bang my head against the wall a little less.

The university program that I had intended for my children to take language classes through had their funding delayed, and their class schedule is still not up, sigh. I hadn't intended to take this long of a hiatus from foreign language study. I've checked out the other titles in the Song School series from the library, and I've decided that for the time being, we'll review the Song School Latin vocab, and then study Song School Spanish and Song School Greek to learn the same vocabulary in those languages. That, at least, will be an excellent spine for future foreign language study.

I've signed the children up to take the AMC 8 exam next month. It's vastly too advanced for them, but it will be excellent practice for future years, when they'll be more competitive, and it will also be excellent practice for taking standardized exams. Nevertheless, the kids should each be able to handle a problem or two, and make a good stab at some others, so I've set aside a spot each week to go over a couple of problems from past exams with them and demonstrate how to solve them using models. As an aside, I've inter-library loaned much of the Beast Academy series through our university library, and I'm eager to peruse it.

FRIDAY/SATURDAY/SUNDAY: I cherish our free day each week, and I usually try not to have any extracurriculars or outside activities on that day, but this is just a busy week, and this week's free Friday will be broken up by an assessment for the kids' upcoming ice skating classes.

On Saturday, my partner will be taking both kids to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for a Girl Scout event--they're going to get to ride their bikes AROUND THE TRACK! How cool is that!?! I'm torn, because I kind of want to call and see if I can still sign up to attend, too, but I can also get a lot done during an entire day home alone, and I feel better about getting stuff done if I know that the kids are doing something fun and engaging elsewhere. So, yeah... we'll see.

Chess club is the only scheduled activity for Sunday, but we've also got to get our chicken coop insulated before the cold weather really hits, so the rest of the day may likely involve much woodwork, some swears, many trips to the hardware store, etc.

You're not going to believe it, but next week is even busier!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

How to Run a School-Level Scripps Spelling Bee for Your Homeschool Group

Spelling bees are practically a rite of passage for kids. The Scripps Spelling Bee is one of the largest academic competitions for children in the nation, so most schoolchildren share the experience of standing up alone in front of an audience, speaking into a microphone, and spelling a word for the judges--for many kids, this will be their first time doing at least a couple of those things. And for everyone other than one kid in the entire nation each year, this will also be the shared experience of, at some point, misspelling a word and losing the competition.

All these--the public speaking, the competition, the academic focus, the winning and losing--are great experiences for kids. I'm a big believer that academic competitions should be as ubiquitous as sports competitions (and that sports competitions should be LESS ubiquitous, but that's another essay entirely...). I'm a big believer in regular exposure to public speaking to desensitize us to it, and a big believer in large-scale academic projects that require lots of research and preparation. And yes, I'm a big believer in losing, because I think it gives us the best practice in good sportmanship, which I'm also a big believer in.

Now, if your kid is in school, you don't have to lift a finger for this spelling bee business; you may not even know it's happened until after the fact. But if you homeschool your kid, then yes, you have many fingers to lift. But the good news is that homeschool groups are just as welcome in the Scripps spelling bees as schools, and even though you'll have to organize the entire school-level bee yourself, it's a very rewarding volunteer job.

1. Get the buy-in. Registering for the bee is pricey, but since it's the same amount of money for a family to register as it is for a homeschool group to register, it's preferable if you can get your homeschool group or co-op to register, and then either take the registration fee from the group's account or split the fee between the participating families.

The con to this is that you may have a debate on your hands, and you may have to convince people who don't like spelling bees, or competitions, or academics, or you. A large and diverse homeschool group will have all those kinds of people, but the most aggressive debaters don't necessarily represent the majority, and at least so far I've found that if I can bring an issue to vote, good academics win out regardless of what side the big personalities are on.

2. Register at the proper time. Registration for the Scripps bee opens up in late August or early September-ish, so keep an eye out. The benefits to enrolling early are that you get a bonus prize for your school-level spelling bee if you enroll early (this year we received a second free Encyclopedia Britannica online subscription on top of the first one that's included with your registration, so both our first and second-place winners received one), and, since your entire homeschool group can make use of all the study materials on the Scripps Spelling Bee site for the duration of your registration, your entire group has access for that much longer at the same price with early registration.

3. Get some help with planning. I asked the few people who knew right away that they wanted to participate in the spelling bee to email me, and then we, as a group, emailed back and forth several times until we hashed out the basics of the bee, namely where and when it would be located and who would run it (more on that later). The people who were involved in this planning were also guaranteed to get the bee scheduled at a time convenient to them, which is a big bonus for busy families.

4. Book a location. I really wanted the spelling bee to be a little nicer, and therefore more special, than our usual fairs and parties and events, so I got Matt to use his connections at IU to get us a beautiful space there, with plenty of free parking, a microphone set-up, and room to hold a potluck reception after the competition. The building manager of the place gave us the room for free, which was awesome.

5. Score some volunteers. For my spelling bee, I wanted to have two pronouncers (so they could take turns), three judges (you want more than one, and you need an odd number in case of disagreements), and an "emcee," or kid wrangler (I was almost thinking that we wouldn't need this one, but we did. Oh, we did).

The pronouncers and judges for the bee should not also have children in the bee; this can make them tricky to staff, because what random adults want to spend a Saturday afternoon judging a children's spelling bee?

Random adults who enjoy community service projects, that's who! I'm an alumna of Alpha Phi Omega, a college-level service organization, and when I knew how many and what types of volunteers I wanted, I contacted the APO chapter here at IU and asked if they could provide student volunteers. They could, and those students could not have been more helpful. Seriously, they made the entire event. They were patient with the kids, they did their jobs perfectly, they handled more than one nerve-wracking kid/parent kerfuffle that I was glad that *I* wasn't having to handle, and if at any point they thought that the homeschoolers/their parents/me were crazy, they kept it to themselves and kept their game faces on.

If you get undergrad volunteers, too, don't forget to remind your volunteers (as I reminded mine) that they can now write "Ran school-level Scripps Spelling Bee" on their resumes.

6. Encourage attendance. Sometimes you've got to really encourage people to participate in things. Maybe they're not sure if their kid would like something, or something seems like too much work, or they're not sure that something is really important to them, etc. If you've got enough lead time, it helps to send a little message every couple of weeks to keep people thinking about the spelling bee, and to give them reasons to participate. You also need to have a database to record sign-ups, both to help people feel more locked-in when they sign up, and to phone someone in an emergency when the bee is supposed to be starting but their kid isn't there yet (this always happens).

Another thing that I thought would be nice to encourage attendance and cheer up any disappointed kids was to hold a potluck reception immediately after the bee. I asked every family to bring something to contribute, and I brought plates, napkins, and bottled water. I'd wanted to have a little food and drink on hand anyway, in case any kids were nervous and needed something on their tummies, but I thought the reception afterwards would be a nice way for everyone to relax, celebrate, and visit together after the bee--and it was!

7. Tell everyone all the rules ahead of time. I did not do this as well as I could have; I assumed that because all the rules are clearly stated on the Scripps spelling bee web site, everyone who planned to participate would have read them as I asked them to. Some people, though, didn't do any prep work specifically for the bee, which is fine, and some just missed reading or understanding some things--it happens. As a result, there were a couple of moments during which a parent or a kid was confused about something, but fortunately our amazing volunteers got every problem straightened out and every wrinkle smoothed without much fuss. Thank GOODNESS for them!

What I DID do was collect some Youtube videos showing other school-level Scripps spelling bees in action, and link them for the families to show their kids. I think it's good for kids to have a model to see, and know what something is going to look like ahead of time.

8. Pack carefully. You should bring with you to the spelling bee site enough copies of the pronunciation guide and rules for each judge and pronouncer; a copy of the dictionary specified in the rules; a step stool in case kids need it to reach the microphone; certificates for each competitor (the Scripps site has these for you to print); your computer so that you can register your champion and give out the prize coupon code(s) on-site; your contribution to the pot luck (and at least bottled water and crackers if you're not having a pot luck afterwards--you know kids and their nervous tummies!); enough popsicle sticks for each competitor (more on this later); your cell phone so that you can call no-shows; a card or certificate to be signed to thank whomever gave you the room you're using for free; and some duct tape, paper, and markers in case you need to make signs to give directions.

I arrived at the site an hour in advance, I asked my volunteers to arrive a half-hour in advance, and I told the families that the bee would start promptly at 1:00, so they should get there before then. In the end, thanks to Matt and the volunteers and their muscles in moving tables and chairs and their smarts in figuring out that stinkin' microphone, everyone was completely ready to go a couple of minutes before 1:00. Inevitably, however, we didn't get started until closer to 1:10, as I tried to call and kept waiting for one no-show. I finally decided that if the kid arrived before the end of the first round we could just toss her in, but she never showed up. This, too, happens, and should be counted on at every event.

9. Put the volunteers in charge. I prepped the volunteers, and told them that when the bee started, they would be in total charge, and I would be just another parent. If any confusion happened, they should just figure it out to the best of their abilities, and the judges' ruling was final.

Before the bee, I wrote numbers on the popsicle sticks, and the volunteers and I lined up chairs for the kids, next to the podium and facing the audience. The emcee had the kids draw these sticks to determine their place in the line-up, and then sit at their place. Because the bee goes in rounds, one of her jobs was to make sure that each kid stayed in the correct order in the line-up--the kids actually did get confused a couple of times, so I was glad once again that I had my kid wrangler!

I asked the volunteers to do a practice round first, so that they could help the kids figure out the microphone and coach them through speaking clearly and enunciating properly:



I asked the volunteers to just give the kids the easiest words in the world for this round, but next time, I may ask them to have each child recite the alphabet. One of the competitors had trouble enunciating a couple of letters, and it caused an issue that thank goodness the judges worked out. One of the good things about a homeschool group, I suppose, is that you probably know the kids competing and know if any of them will have speech issues that should be brought to the judges' attention.

Here's what it looks like when a speller encounters a homonym:


They were all so little behind that podium! You can see my step stool there to the side, shoved aside by all the children after the first couple of rounds.

Our spelling bee went pretty perfectly, lasting about an hour. Up until the bee started, I had been very disappointed that more children weren't participating, but when we got started, I realized that if THIS was what it took to get this number of competitors through the bee, then I was happy not to have the twenty kids that I'd been wishing for!

Our bee was drawn out a little longer, as well, because after one kid won, the judges had to bring back up the two kids who'd tied for second place and have them spell again to break the tie, because there has to be a second-place winner; we had a second-place prize! The two kids were so evenly matched, though, that this tie-breaker took a while, and next year I'll tell the judges that if that happens, they can feel free to flip a few pages to get to the harder words.

It was with much happiness and relief, then, that we finally crowned a second-place winner, handed out the certificates with much fanfare, and moved on to eating, drinking, chatting, and running around. I told the volunteers that they could eat some food, but they did not have to help clean up, and I thanked them abjectly and profusely. This is also when you should take the champion's parent aside and register the kid for the district bee, as well as make sure that the parent knows how to find all the contact information and study materials for that bee. It is inevitable that by the time you get over to the potluck, yourself, all that will be left is a couple of pineapple slices, when you know for a fact everyone was eating doughnuts earlier! This, too, happens.

10. Clean up. When families start making noises about getting ready to go, you start making noises about getting the room put back together. Then everyone will help, and many hands make light labor. This is also when you should make sure that everyone has signed the card for whomever donated the room--you want them to feel good and happy and give you another room another time!

11. Follow up. Within a few days of the bee, you should make sure that your winning kid's parent has heard from the district bee organizer, and if they haven't, that they have that contact info. After that, you're done until next year!

I won't lie--there were times, organizing this spelling bee, when I was NOT sure that it was going to be worth it. You know what, though? It totally was. I enjoyed having all the kids there, watching them compete, congratulating them, and giving them the spelling bee experience, but Will, in particular, made me really, REALLY proud. She wasn't always thrilled about studying, but she did study, hard enough that she absolutely saw her studying pay off during the competition. She visibly grew in confidence during the bee, she clearly did her best, and she was a great sport. I'll do the whole thing all over again next year to share that experience with her.

We're Having a Spelling Bee!

I am just now starting to let myself get excited about the school-level Scripps Spelling Bee that I'm organizing for one of our homeschool groups later this month. It was a pain in the butt to get approved and planned out, yes, but I am a firm believer that a healthy dose of competition is good for kids. There are so many valuable lessons in competition--the concrete reward for practice and preparation, the realization that you don't necessarily get something just because you want it (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and your unrealistic morals, I'm looking at YOU!), the chance to practice winning and losing with dignity and grace, etc. I'm an even firmer believer in academic competitions, and always disappointed that they're so much more rare than sports competitions. I'd love for all chess matches and spelling bees to have the same enthusiastic audiences that go to the softball games of six-year-olds.

So I'm all set for this upcoming spelling bee. Practice in taking turns and following rules! Practice in winning and losing with grace! Practice in standing and speaking in front of an audience! Practice in interacting with judges! Practice in speaking into a microphone!

And practice in spelling, of course.

After the bee is over, I've got a post planned that's a tutorial for how to run a school-level spelling bee for a homeschool group, but as I'm still in the prep stage, here are some of the school-level spelling bee videos that I've been using to help me organize our own spelling bee:

This is a lengthy video, but it's the best because it encompasses the entire school bee, from the first speller to the champion. If you watch it, you'll see the kids model how to take turns at the microphone, how to ask the correct types of questions to get more information about a word, how to spell a word without starting over or unnecessarily repeating letters, what it looks like to misspell a word, and how to act when you do.

It also illustrates the only tricky part of the spelling bee--the "champion round" rule. Basically, one round consists of all uneliminated spellers in that round spelling their word and either being eliminated or moving on. The last kid standing after all other spellers are eliminated is first given the most recently misspelled word to spell, and then, if the kid spells that word correctly, it's as if the kid begins a new round all on her own. She's given a new word to spell. If she spells that word correctly, she's the winner! If she spells either word incorrectly, however, the bee retraces its steps back to the previous round. Everyone who was eliminated in that previous round returns, and that round begins again with new words.


I like this one, because our bee will look a lot like it. We're holding it in a fancy meeting room on the IU campus, but it won't have a stage. It WILL have a podium and microphone, and although I'm also bringing a step stool from home, we could equally also end up using a hand-held mike.

This one amuses me when I start to stress out that our spelling bee won't be nice enough--there's no stage! No name placards! No medals, certificates, or trophies!!! But if these kids are happy to stand in their library and spell to a folding table, then it's clearly not about the placards and medals and certificates or trophies.

Here's what it's about:

Here's an example of what a district-level spelling bee looks like--this is the level of bee that our champion will move up to. It's a little more intense, isn't it? It should be, because the bee after this is the national one!

Participating in the spelling bee was one of the very happiest parts of my own childhood. I vividly remember studying from the spelling bee booklet every year (it's a pdf now), and how it felt to sit on the stage with the other kids and then take my turn spelling. I remember trying to figure out how to act towards the kids that everyone knew were the "big competition," and furiously misspelling every other kid's word in my head during their turns, in case someone was a mind reader and trying to cheat by reading my mind (I was a *very* weird little kid...). It still makes me feel good to remember how proud my entire elementary school was of me after I came in second place in our district spelling bee; seriously, they declared one Friday to be Julie Finn Day, and there were balloons, a giant poster signed by the entire school, a ceremony in the auditorium, a thesaurus given to me by a representative from one of the local factories that was our school sponsor, and I felt both abashed and like a rock star.

My Papa never went to the district spelling bee to watch me compete, any of the four years that I did so (I did lousy one year, then came in third, then second, and then second again; in high school, I became good friends with the kid who beat me out every single one of those years, and in college I told those stories about her and the spelling bee so often that my best friend from that time still occasionally asks about her when we talk), because he said he'd get too nervous; instead, he stayed home and recorded the spelling bee, which actually interrupted the Saturday morning cartoons on our local CBS station. I know for a fact that we still have all those VHS tapes of my spelling bees... somewhere, and I should totally put them on DVD before humanity moves so far past the VCR that it becomes impossible.

In other words, I can't wait to share this spelling bee experience with a whole new batch of little kids.