Spellings are always important for not only children but also adults. It isn’t really hard to learn spellings if you know basic alphabets. It becomes hard when words sound the same for example, ‘there’ and ‘their’ or ‘flower’ and ‘flour’, and also when words have different pronunciations than how they are spelled, like ‘honest’ where the h is silent or ‘bright’ where g and h are silent.

Words like “Idiosyncrasies” or “kaleidoscope”- when you hear these words, they sound very sophisticated but spelling out these words can be hard. Then there are words in which you always confuse vowels. In words such as “bureau”, you don’t know where to put “e” or “a” or “u”. So, learning spellings is an art and to learn this art of spelling correct words, you need to work really hard.

To encourage learning the art of spellings, Pak-Turk schools organized an Inter-school Spelling Bee Contest amongst 5 of its branches in Lahore on Friday 14th September, 2018. The inter-school competition aimed at testing students from all the PakTurk School branches who are preparing for the Dawn Spelling Bee Contest to assess their preparation. Three students from each of the five campuses took part in the competition.

Pak Turk School, Islampura Campus invited Alina Hamid, Project Manager of the Children’s Literature Festival and CEO, The Little Art to form the adjudication panel for the Spelling Bee.
The first round of the competition was very exciting as students contested in teams of 3. They seemed to know all the words by heart!

Five students qualified for the final round. From the initial round till the final round, all students performed very enthusiastically. Students were accompanied by their respective teachers from each school who fairly took pride in the judges’ reactions to the jaw-dropping performance by their young and bright students. It was a sight!
Participants were confident and on their foot to spell any word asked from them! Judges by the final round were scrolling through the Oxford Dictionary to find long and difficult words to reach the final decision.
Some would ask for the meaning of the word before spelling it out and some would request a sentence be made to shun any confusion regarding the understanding of the word announced. The excitement, nervousness and dedication of the participants was so refreshing!

Students were not only judged over their ability to spell words but also their overall competency to follow the rules of the Spelling Bee Contest and their confidence and audibility. Each round was extremely competitive, and mostly students missed their chance to win only by misspelling one word!
Winners were awarded a trophy while all other participants were given prizes and certificates.
Dawn spelling bee contest will be held from September-November. It is an inter school competition. The winners will then compete at national and regional level. It is part of the Dawn’s ‘Dawn In Education’ program which encourages learning out of the classrooms.

We at CLF wish all the participants of the PakTurk Schools best of luck for the Dawn Spelling Bee!