The funny thing is, all of that may not help - I washed out in state on “glacier” in fifth grade. I wasn’t nervous, I wasn’t scared, I certainly knew how to spell the word, I just screwed up. Made a mistake. It was the fourth round or something. So I guess the big thing is to impress on the kid how much spelling bees don’t really matter in life. 
Do they still have the lists of past words divided up into different levels of difficulty? Back in my spelling bee days, they were divided up into easy, medium, and hard levels. Basically, my mother spent time asking me how to spell the words, starting with easy and working her way up. We never used a dictionary for word lists. (Then again, I certainly didn’t get to a national bee either!)
I can’t really say how much is too much, however. For my first county bee, I would frequently outlast my mom’s patience in asking me words and was absolutely focused. For my second county bee, I didn’t care one whit and probably spent a grand total of an hour preparing. It’s probably good to let him set the pace as he will.
Another spelling bee geek checking in.
Everyone else has given you good advice but I do have one tip for the kid. Sit his butt down and make him read this:
If you have the slightest bit of doubt, ask for a definition.
Don’t ask them to use the word in a sentence, ask for a definition. Make them haul out the dictionary.
I lost a spelling bee once because I was given a word that didn’t even freakin’ exist. Had I asked for a definition, they would have seen that it wasn’t in the dictionary and given me another and I probably would have won, judging from the rest of the words given in the competition.
The word, in case you’re wondering, was (as best I can spell it), raisiney. Yes, we all know what it means when we read it, but try to find it in a dictionary.
Thank you, I had wondered about this. A word used in the documentary sounded very odd to me and none of us could figure out the correct spelling. We looked it up on dictionary.com and could not find it! That’s just wrong.
What I have seen them do is write the word out with their finger on the back identity card they wear around their necks. Which makes me want to design a much cooler ‘card’ for them to wear or be identified with - talk about early nerd branding! :smack:
Now you have to tell us what that word was, Terrorcotta. I saw Spellbound and recognized most of the words.
You’re right to be concerned about spelling quickly. I got dinged on “ebullience” because I viewed it as an easy word, knew how to spell it, and spelled it so quickly that I left out the “i”.
I also recommend asking for the etymology of the word. Different languages have their spelling quirks and this can help in deducing the correct spelling of the word.
Ok, it was ‘heleoplankton’. I thought it would be ‘helioplankton’ but was surprised when they said ‘heleo-’. Of course, we may have all heard it wrong but neither word is on dictionary.com. Do you remember what it was?
There are three things I’ve concluded about spelling bees on the national level. First, there are techniques that you can teach a child that will allow him to learn to spell hard words, and they are more specific than just telling him to read a lot. It was obvious from the movie Spellbound that there are ways to teach a child about word roots in Latin and Greek mostly (but also in some other languages) by which you can greatly increase the spelling ability of the child. This may take you all the kid’s spare time over the year before the bee, but it’s doable. In so far as I know, no one has published a book detailing these techniques. I suspect that the parents who have learned to do it consider these methods to be their proprietary knowledge. Indeed, I suspect that there are now consultants who get paid to prep students for spelling bees, and there’s no way they are going to give their techniques away for free.
Second, I would suggest that you listen carefully to your child about his feelings on this. If he is saying, “Mom, Dad, I’m really sick of this. Can we just forget about this contest?”, then do so. This isn’t worth making your kid hate you.
Third, it’s dubious what winning even the national spelling bee means in the long term. If you want to get your child to be able to breeze though medical school or doing his doctoral thesis, this may well be the proper training. Winning a national spelling bee is about memorizing a huge amount of not very connected and somewhat arbitrary facts. This isn’t such a bad thing, since certain jobs require a period in which you have to spend memorizing the basic facts of your job. On the other hand, if you want your child to become a Nobel-prize-winning scientist or novelist, this is irrelevant. Sure, there is a beginning level at which you have to memorize a lot of things, but there’s a higher level at which you have be creative and able to think deeply about all those facts you’ve memorized.
I guess I was just hoping that in the event of a killer asteroid he would be made ship’s proofreader.
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