Mildward named county spelling champ
TONY BROWN/DAILY FORUM
Pictured are the winners and runners-up of Thursday’s Nodaway County Spelling Bee. Shown from left are Hayden Mildward, first place, Gunnar Grispino, second place, and regional bee alternates Reed McIntyre (third place) and Chloe Schimming (fourth place).
It’s one thing to be able to spell a word, knowing what it means is something else again.
That was the lesson learned by nearly a third of the ten participants in this year’s Nodaway County Spelling Bee, which took place Thursday evening at Northeast Nodaway School in Ravenwood.
The contest lasted 16 rounds — 13 of which amounted to a two-person contest between eventual winner Hayden Mildward, an eighth-grader from Maryville Middle School, and runner-up Gunnar Grispino, a sixth-grader representing St. Gregory’s School.
For the first time the bee included a vocabulary round, during which contestants were asked not to spell a word but to choose one of two options as its correct definition.
For example, if the word-reader asked “What is porridge made from? A., fur or B., grain” the speller, in order to remain in the bee, had to reply “B., grain.”
In the event, the vocabulary round caused more participants to lose their seats in the spelling line than any other.
Marcello Brownsberger, a St. Gregory’s seventh-grader, mistakenly defined “paunch” as “an intuitive guess.” The other two vocabulary victims were Maryville Middle School’s Jackson Ozanne (sixth grade), who stumbled over “jocularity,” and Ben Boswell of Northeast Nodaway (fifth grade), who picked the wrong meaning for “skirmish.”
Northeast Nodaway sixth-grade teacher Barb Bredlow, the site coordinator for this year’s county bee, said vocabulary rounds proved deadly during the district’s schoolwide spelling contest held earlier in the academic year.
Of 25 Northwest Nodaway students who participated in the bee, Bredlow said, fully half were eliminated during three vocabulary rounds.
As for the strictly spelling portion of Thursday’s contest, Mildward and Grispino breezed through the early going, and then got down to business as the words became progressively longer and more difficult.
Words called out in the later rounds included “fidelity,” “cockatoo,” “behoove,” “homonym,” “ventilate” and “typhoon.”
Grispino finally stumbled over “finale” moments before Mildward clinched the win with “dungaree.”
Retired history teacher David Primm and Northeast Nodaway Assistant Principal Debbie From served as judges for the contest. The word-reader was Northeast Nodaway English teacher Seth Jenkins.
Mildward and Grispino now advance to regional competition in March. Should they be unable to compete, alternate “A” Reed McIntyre, a Northeast Nodaway seventh-grader, and alternate “B” Chloe Schimming, a student at West Nodaway R-I, will go in their stead.
Other contestants included Malia Collins, sixth grade, and Ashley Riley, eighth grade (Jefferson); Jackson Ozanne (Maryville Middle School, sixth grade); Ben Boswell (Northeast Nodaway, fifth grade); Marcello Brownsberger (St. Gregory’s School, seventh grade); and Harley Caudill (West Nodaway, sixth grade).
