Camilla Giraldo, Makenna Rinella y Lewis Price, ganadores del Spelling Bee. Cortesía de / Courtesy of: Fronteras Charter School.

Spanish Spoken
fourth annual spelling bee contest in spanish

BY sol de Medianoche

After Mandarin Chinese, Spanish is the language with the second largest number of speakers in the world, according to the Cervantes Institute, one of the highest authorities on the promotion, dissemination and research of Spanish. With 40 million speakers, Spanish is the second most common language in the United States after English, as reported by the 2015 census. So learning Spanish is now very important in the US. 

Children who learn Spanish extend their networks of collaboration to those millions of speakers. And through the language they find ways to better understand Hispanic culture and to engage with Latinos in a meaningful way. Aware of this, on March 7 the Fronteras Charter School in Wasilla held the fourth annual Spelling Bee in Spanish. About 50 contestants from third through eighth grades from Anchorage’s and Wasilla’s Spanish Immersion Programs spelled words of increasing difficulty. Naturally, the participants included young people whose mother tongue is Spanish, but also others who learned it as a foreign language and yet whose spelling is impeccable. Students from both groups qualified among the finalists. 
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Camilla Giraldo, an eighth grade student at Fronteras, won the contest with the word “desensibilización” (desensitization). Second place was won by Makenna Rinella from Fronteras, and Lewis Price from Government Hill took third. 

​Informar, Educar, & Unir
Inform, Educate, & Unite