This is an attempt to document the spelling methods I tried to introduce to staff and students alike during my regime.

For instance, I tried to get students to be aware of the fact that sometimes, small words exist within big words.

Last year, I sent out this beautifully crafted email to all Spelling Bee participants after the Preliminary Round. Unfortunately, it seems that the message didn’t get sent out. The team was supposed to set up a Google Classroom for all participants, but due to the barrage of tasks we all had to do, I never realised this idea. Perhaps setting up a Google Classroom for all participants should be first n foremost on our radar this year. Anyway, enjoy reading my beautiful email:

*Dear students,

Words are wonderful. When you choose the right word, you express your feelings precisely.

Choosing feeling words We focused on the five core emotions, Happy, Sad, Scared, Angry, Disgust. You may recognise them as characters from the movie “Inside Out”. We then chose these words:

furious, heartbroken, delighted, despairing, elated

“Delighted” and “elated” belong to the same word cline of happiness. “Elated” > “delighted”

“Heartbroken” and “despairing” belong to the same word cline of sadness. “Despairing” > “heartbroken”

We hope that you will remember these words and use them to describe your feelings.

How to remember these words

We recommend these tips:

In fact, you can think of Unity Port as a way to remember the spelling of “opportunity”.*

In any case, Ms Bubble Tea made reference to these spelling methods in the video she created to hype up the atmosphere for the finals. So it wasn’t like my words had gone to waste haha.

As the I/C, I took care to make sure that there was some correlation between the words used for the Junior Round (Year 1 & 2 students) and the words used for their seniors (Year 3 & 4 students) for the finals. Like, the words used for the Junior Round would be stepping stones to help them spell the longer and more complicated words for the Senior Round:

You can see that I employed the doubling up rule and tested words with the ‘shun’ sound. I created these two posters and sent it out to the staff prior to the Finals:

Other than the Google Classroom, one thing this year’s team could do is to decide on the list of prefixes and suffixes that the Spelling Bee would focus on - so that English teachers and Form teachers could do the needful for their participants? Early notification would ensure greater memory retention on the part of the student population since we give them a long runway to remember the affixes and associated spelling rules.

Oh don’t worry, Sensei can tell you the top 20 most frequently used prefixes and suffixes: