Bulgarian National English Spelling Bee

After the long preparation period the Spelling Bee competition entered its active phase at the last weeks of February.

The school competitions were held from February18 to March 2, 2022.  Several schools organized 2 school competitions due to the big number of registered participants. 220 school competitions took place during that week for the SB and 155 for SBJunior. The school competitions were organized “in person” and only 5 of them were online due to local quarantine requirements.

CORPluS staff visited schools in Sofia and the area which participate for the first time and provided support and guidance.  All participants in the school competitions and the teacher-coordinators received certificates and small awards in appreciation of their efforts and hard work. 50 schools took part in the photo contest and sent pictures from the school competitions in 3 categories – “BEEs are better together”, “BEEcause we love yellow”, “We are a BEE school”.  The results of the competition will be announced in April.

As every year, we offered all registered schools an opportunity to take part in an additional campaign under the slogan “Search BEEyound the obvious”.  It is focused on the media literacy of the students and our efforts were focused on development of the critical thinking of the students, searching for information and analyzing it, team work, solving problems, creation of positive and high-quality digital content and safe online communication. The campaign is organized in partnership with Media Literacy Coalition. 2 trainings were organized for the interested teachers and 28 took part in them. They had the opportunity to work on the development of their own lesson plans on media literacy topics and also had the chance to create a network and exchange the materials they created.

The first two students from each SB school qualified for the regional competitions and studied 200 additional words. The school champions from SBJ schools also qualified for the regional competitions and had to study 100 additional words.

On March 26th and 27th eight regional competitions took place in 7 cities around the country – Sofia (2), Plovdiv, Blagoevgrad, Sliven, Varna, Razgrad and Lovech. CORPluS Foundation identified and trained volunteers to help with organizing the regional events. All the announcers were native speakers (Fulbright ETAs) with a teaching experience in the country and they contributed a lot to the success of the competitions. Former Spelling Bee finalists were also involved as judges and helped with organizing the competitions. They served as role models and many 7^th graders already asked how they could get involved as volunteers in Spelling Bee events. This practice is very well appreciated and demonstrated that the Spelling Bee alumni still belong to the big Spelling Bee family. All participants at the regional competitions and their teachers were awarded with certificates and prizes for their achievements.  The 3 best spellers from each regional competition qualify for the national final which will happen on April 16th in Sofia. The best 24 spellers received additional100 words to study in order to prepare for the final.

For the first time the school champions from SBJunior participated in regional competitions. 7 Spelling Bee Junior regional competitions were organized online on March 28th and 29th. The young spellers demonstrated impressive English language knowledge and skills, as well as a lot of enthusiasm and ambition. The first 3 spellers from each regional competition qualify for the national final which will be on May 14th in Sofia. The finalists received a list of 50 additional words for the final.

The preparation for both finals is underway and the results will be reported in the next report.