Two regional winners from the Clarence are among 98 word wizards aiming to spell well after becoming state finalists in the annual Premier’s Spelling Bee, the final to be held on Friday November 8 in Sydney.
Bowie Robinson and River Robinson, both from Yamba Public School, will contest the junior and senior sections respectively. The sections each have 49 contestants.
The finalists
have won at school and regional level, correctly spelling words such as:
Junior words: perpetual, forfeit, pharmacy
Senior words: pejorative, feign, preposterous
The 98 students in the State final are the cream of the crop, in the top 0.05% of all competition entrants.
Now it its 16th year, the 2019 Spelling Bee has seen a record participation of almost 170,000 students from 1006 public schools in NSW, an increase of 2520 students and 50 schools on the 2018 challenge.
To accommodate the growth in entrants, the NSW Department of Education this year hosted 49 regional finals, of which 28 were in rural NSW and 21 in Sydney Metro. The 2019 state final will be held in the Eugene Goossens Hall, ABC Centre, Ultimo.
The Premier’s Spelling Bee started in 2004 to support primary school students in their spelling while having fun at the same time. The program includes activities to encourage all students to improve their vocabulary and spelling and to promote literacy skills in combination with the English K-6 Syllabus.