Rodney Stevens

Year 5 student Willow Allen will continue Yamba Public School’s success in the state NSW Premier’s Spelling Bee next month as the fifth representative from the school in the past 8 years to reach the final.

The aspiring architect told the CV Independent this was the third year she had competed in the NSW Premier’s Spelling Bee and the first year that she had reached the state finals.

“I’ve been in the Spelling Bee since I was in year 3 and the highest place I got was when I was in year 3 and I got to regionals, in year 4 I got to the school level finals but this year I got to the state final which is really exciting,” she said.

To make it to the 2024 NSW Premier’s Spelling Bee state final, Willow beat almost 200,000 of her peers and was one of more than 1800 students competed in 60 regional finals over a 10-day period.

To improve her spelling, Willow said she has been reading a lot, studying 9-page word sheets provided by the NSW Premier’s Spelling Bee to familiarise herself with words she could be asked, and reading the dictionary before she goes to bed.

“As a family we work together and Willow reviews the words, we do spelling tests, and her and I do ‘spell offs’,” Willow’s father Andrew said.

“He’s very bad at the ‘spell offs’,” Willow said.

“She has beat me every time,” Andrew laughed.

In her third year of representing Yamba Public School at the NSW Premier’s Spelling Bee, Willow said she was excited to compete in the state final against the best young minds from around the state.

“I like representing my school, because my school is very sport obsessed, I wanted to show that there are students pursuing academic achievements outside sport,” she said.

As an avid speller, Willow said she has favourite words to spell and words that she dreads.

“One of my favourite words was the name Tchaikovsky but I never got that word, and one word that I wouldn’t like to spell is Mellifluous, because the man that was saying the words at the regionals accidentally pronounced it wrong and I couldn’t remember if it was double-l or one-l and because he pronounced it wrong I got another word,” she said.

Now she is in the state final, Willow said she will have to spell words she is unprepared for.

“Now we’re in the state final we start on level 4 and do levels 4, 5, and 6, then we do unseen words that we haven’t practiced so I read the dictionary before bed,” she said.

Yamba Public School Principal, Phil Cavanagh said he was proud of the school’s success in the Spelling Bee over the past eight years, but said the school hadn’t implemented anything in tis curriculum to develop these spelling superstars.

“I think the students that have been to the Spelling Bee state finals have all been very self-motivated and that’s really helped them achieve the goals that they set,” he said.

“They really wanted to do well, they were really keen, enthusiastic readers and they had that motivation to achieve.

“We haven’t been focusing on spelling or having a big push on it, it forms part of the new literacy syllabus, which is really important, but we’re not targeting any particular area, we are just trying to give the kids a good all-round general education.”

Willow will take to the Q Theatre Penrith mic on Friday, November 1 and compete for Spelling Bee senior state champion.
The CV Independent will follow up on Willow’s progress following the final.