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Canyon Lake 8th grader wins 33rd Annual Riverside County Spelling Bee
Canyon Lake Middle School eighth-grader Kendra Burns won the 33rd Annual Riverside County Spelling Bee on Wednesday, March 24, by correctly spelling the word “catoptromancy” after three hours on stage at the Moreno Valley Conference Center.
Hugging her mother, Kimberly Burns, after 27 tense rounds marked by increasingly difficult word lists, Kendra was asked if she knew what her winning word meant. “I have no idea,” she said. “But you can usually figure it out by asking about the origin, Greek or Latin.”
Her mother, Kimberly Burns, ran to get a dictionary given to Kendra as part of her prize package. “Catoptromancy,” which did not appear on any of the practice lists, means “divination by a mirror or by crystal gazing.” She said her daughter has competed at the county level Bee three times before winning.
The real prize will come when Kendra will travel to Washington D.C. June 2-4, 2010, to represent Riverside County in the 82nd Annual Scripps National Spelling Bee. She will face 250 top spellers from across the country. The trip is paid for by county Spelling Bee sponsor the Riverside Press-Enterprise.
The competition for the overall county winner started Wednesday with 25 students, each of whom had won their local district spelling bee.
Second place was a tie between Raymond Galloway, a seventh-grader from Vista Verde Middle School in the Val Verde Unified School District, and Christian Kontaxis, a fifth-grader from St. Margaret’s Episcopal School in Palm Desert. Because of the tie, there was no third place finisher. Fourth place went to Shruti Amin, a sixth-grader from Thompson Middle School in the Murrieta Valley Unified School District, and Kisha Thayapran, an eighth-grader at Dartmouth Middle School in the Hemet Unified School District.
The top two elementary school students, Christian Kontaxis and Shruti Amin, will represent Riverside County at the California State Elementary Spelling Bee for grades four through six on May 15, 2010, paid for by the Riverside County Office of Education.
For information contact:
Rick Peoples,
Public Information Officer
Telephone: (951) 826-6642
Fax: (951) 826-6199
rpeoples@rcoe.us
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