114 finalists, 59 females and 55 males of The Spelling Bee 2022 edition are set to battle for victory, the ultimate prize and the bragging rights as the best speller in Ghana come February 5, 2022, drawing the curtain on another successful edition.
Over the past 14 editions, 9 girls as well as 5 boys have emerged as winners of the competition. And the question on minds of many is, which gender will emerge as this year’s winner?
In 2021, a female, 11-year-old Naa Koshie Manyo-Plange of the Roman Ridge School in Accra won the competition after an intense 15 rounds of spelling. The 2020 finals also saw 11-year-old Nadia Chelpang Mashoud from the Northern Regional capital, Tamale, adjudged champion.
Emerging as the finalists, the 114 spellers have gone through three stages of the four-tiered spelling programme- preliminaries, quarter-finals, semi-finals and now the national finals.
From an initial pool of about 500 spellers, 340 of them went through the preliminaries, then 264 spellers advanced to the quarter-finals. Out of the 173 who qualified for the semi-finals, 114 students have qualified for a spot in the national finals.
The 114 national finalists of The Spelling Bee 2022 are coming from 12 cities and towns in the country namely: Kpando, Keta, Accra, Tema, Dodowa, Akropong, Peduase, Cape Coast, Takoradi, Obuasi, Kumasi and Kenyasi.
The person who emerges as the winner come February 5 will also have the opportunity of representing Ghana on the international stage. For over a decade, champions from The Spelling Bee are accorded the honour of participating in the internationally acclaimed contest, Scripps National Spelling Bee in Maryland, United States of America (USA).
The Spelling Bee, a national spelling competition, which began about 15 years ago, has had a substantial impact on the education of Ghanaian children in primary schools across the country.
The Spelling Bee – Ghana
The Spelling Bee Ghana (TSBGH) is a literacy programme that teaches primary children between ages 8 and 13 how to improve their spelling, increase their vocabularies, learn and understand word concepts, and develop English usage. The Spelling Bee is affiliated with the Scripps National Spelling Bee, USA.
Bee Prepared
Bee Prepared is a new feature of The Spelling Bee, which is open to anyone who wants to have feel of the Bee, from anywhere in the world. It is open to all interested persons however, if one wishes to leverage the training to prepare themselves to participate in The Spelling Bee, then they must be between the ages of 7 and 13 or between grades 3 and 7.
According to Eugenia Tachie-Menson, Country Director of the Young Educators Foundation, organizers of The Spelling Bee, Bee Prepared is a 12-week online based course that will focus on topics under The Spelling Bee literacy training programme.
