Register now for the 2022 Champion Spelling Bee, to be held August 27-28!

Details can be found at https://championspellingbee.org/. Click here to register.

TONIGHT’S THE NIGHT!!!!!!!

Good luck to my students Roy Seligman (#1), Zaila Avant-garde (#133), and Chaitra Thummala (#190) as they compete in the Championship Finals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Orlando, Florida tonight! Tune in to ESPN2 to watch.

These spellers have been working toward this night for so many years. All the late nights, early mornings, blood, sweat, and tears have all lead up to this very moment.

Don’t miss it!!! TUNE INTO ESPN2 RIGHT NOW!!!!

CONGRATS to my students Zaila Avant-Garde of Harvey, Louisiana and another [anonymous] student for their fantastic performances in the Mission Spelling Bee tonight!

• Zaila placed 1st overall
• The other student placed 3rd overall

With less than 7 months remaining before Scripps, time to keep on constantly improving!

Good luck to Surya Kapu and Zaila Avant-garde, students in the coaching program, tonight in the Championship Finals of the Mission Spelling Bee (missionspellingbee.com)! Those two are among the six total Championship Finalists and will vie for the title tonight.

The Finals will be live-streamed on Facebook at 8pm ET.

Congrats to everyone who participated today in the Finals of the national Hexco-Kaplan Bee, and to all my students who participated in the competition. Special congratulations to my student Zaila Avant-garde of Harvey, Louisiana for being crowned the champion.

With this win, Zaila wins $10,000, free access to Kaplan’s pre-college programs (such as ACT, SAT, or PSAT prep), and an enormous 26-inch trophy, provided by the fantastic bee organizers over at Hexco and Kaplan. I am elated for Zaila — this success is a testament to her incredible hard work and perseverance over the last several months that I have been working with her.

This competition contained

• 88 of some of the nations best spellers, including 10 who were students or alumni of my coaching program
• A Grand Finals stage containing the Top 21 spellers in the Bee, of which 6 were students/alumni of the program. 4 of my students placed in the Top 5 or better.

I’d like to congratulate

• Michael Kolagani and Vayun Krishna, who placed 13th
• Dean Alkhairy and Nitya Kathiravan, who placed 5th
• One more current student who will remain anonymous for now, who placed somewhere within the Top 3
• And Zaila Avant-garde, who won 1st place

These spellers have set a very elite standard, and credit goes to them for their outstanding hard work and diligence.

Now, the focus shifts to the next competition. It’s time to correct any issues, stave off complacency, and start improving for the next one!

Congrats to the students and alumni of my coaching program who participated in the National Hexco-Kaplan Bee, especially those reaching the Grand Finals! Of my ten participating students/alumni, eight qualified for the Semifinals (Top 48). Congrats to Akshita Balaji for her 35th place finish, and Jayden Lee for coming in 27th. We’ll continue working hard to elevate to even higher levels. Six of my ten students/alumni — including Nitya Kathiravan, Michael Kolagani, Vayun Krishna, Zaila Avant-garde, Dean Alkhairy, and one more — have qualified for the Grand Finals! To watch, go to https://onlinespellingbee.com/live/ at 10am CST tomorrow. Best of luck to everyone competing, and thank you to Hexco and Kaplan for organizing this event!

Good luck to my students Zaila Avant-garde and Dean Alkhairy who’ve qualified for the Top 7 in the Championship Finals of tonight’s national Mission Spelling Bee! The Finals begin tonight at 6pm CST and will be streamed live on YouTube.

Since the 2020 Scripps National Spelling Bee’s cancellation, the Spell Pundit Online National Spelling Bee has stepped up to serve as the de facto replacement. Beginning on Saturday, May 23, the Spell Pundit Online National Spelling Bee started with over 250 participants, including many past Scripps Finalists and the most elite spellers in the world.

After the Semifinals yesterday, that field of over 250 was whittled down to the Top 16 in the world, who will participate in the Grand Finals tonight at 6pm CST. Four of those 16 have been trained in my program (seven of my students from my program sign up to participate, so over half of them remain in the competition!) That includes eighth grader Dean Alkhairy, seventh grader Akshita Balaji, seventh grader Aritra Banerjee, and sixth grader Vayun Krishna.

Here’s the link to watch.

Good luck to them tonight!!!

Hey everyone!

Big news! I’ve been working tirelessly for the past few months, and I finally have something to show for it. My first list, The School Spelling Bee Supplemental, will release within 24 hours.

I synthesized this list to be the end-all solution for the “Additional Words” that come after the study list in the Classroom and School Bees. After perusing decades of old additional words from years past and uncovering specific patterns, I carefully handpicked exactly 1,200 words from an assortment of older lists and from my own discovery.

When I was done with my selections and revisions, I put my algorithm to trial by fire and found that a whopping 44% of the words on the list were used as Additional Words in Classroom or School Bees since 2009. This means that 4 of every 9 words are former Additional Words.

To give you an idea of how revolutionary this is, let’s take the next-best list for Classroom and School Bee Additional Words, the Consolidated Word List. Only about 5% of the words on the CWL have been used as Additional Words, and on average you’d have to study about 19 words before coming across 1 Additional Word. That isn’t terrible, but doesn’t really compare to the list I’ve created.

In addition, the guide has an in-depth description on how the Classroom and School Bees work, the formula for winning your school bee, tips for Bee Day preparation, must-know rules, and proven strategies on how to handle your words during the bee.

The School Spelling Bee Supplemental is easily the best resource for the Classroom and School Bees, and is all-but certain to contain some of the elusive Additional Words in your bee.

How can I be so sure? Because Numbers Never Lie.

Stay tuned, and thanks for your continued support!

The 2017-2018 School Spelling Bee Study List released a few days ago.

For the most part, Scripps hasn’t changed much from previous years.

They’ve opted to keep words with spaces, hyphenated words, and words with alternate spellings, and it doesn’t seem like they will stop in the foreseeable future.

Perhaps what stands out most is the massive amount of plurals and adverbs.  This is probably because of the fact that the words on this list are taken directly from a specific set of novels, and the syntax of some sentences requires the use of plurals and adverbs in place of their unconjugated forms.

Still, with words like brachiopods and dauntlessly in the 2017 National Preliminaries, Scripps has sent a clear message that they will continue to increase their usage of plurals and adverbs at all levels of competition.  Make sure you understand the rules and know the suffixes involved in pluralization.  This extends further than just adding -s at the end of a noun or changing -y to -ies.  Take a look at the word on the new study list, crematoria, for example.

Most of the words are in common study lists, such as the Consolidated Word List, among others, with some exceptions in lichenous, Bollywood, Kilimanjaro, and pièce de résistance.

Overall, the words are of similar difficulty, if not slightly harder than those in previous years’ lists.  Either way, you’ll need to memorize all 450 words to have a legitimate chance in most school bees.  Good luck and happy studying!

Special thanks to Jake Lance for finding this list!