The difference between Central Otago's best young spellers last night was atrocious. That word - atrocious - decided the winners in the year 7 and 8 section of the Otago Daily Times Extra! Central Otago spelling quiz after the two top teams finished on equal points.
The teams, from Clyde School and The Terrace School in Alexandra first had to spell cuisine in the tie-breaker and when both answered correctly, they were asked to spell atrocious. The winning Terrace team, Ruby Sawer, Ariana Rogers and Fuki
Baker, admitted to having ''butterflies'' in the play-off, but they trusted their instincts.
''We actually didn't know for sure if it was a 't' or a 'c' but Fuki knew and wrote it down straight away and it looked right,'' Ruby explained.
The girls have all entered the spelling quiz before but this was the first time they were placed. They finished with 95 points out of 100 after 10 rounds of competition, Clyde had 94 and Arrowtown 3 had 93 points.
Thirty-six teams from schools all over the wider Central Otago area gathered in Cromwell to vie for top honours in the year 7 and 8 contest and the same number of teams met earlier in the day to decide the year 5 and 6 winners. Remarkables Primary School entered the quiz for the first time and provided the winning year 5 and 6 team - Olivia Johnson, Paulo Bjorck and Alex Bailey. The trio said they had been training hard.
''We all read a lot and we're all pretty good spellers,'' Olivia said. Teamwork was the secret to their success, they said.
''I think we worked well as a team and ... we had fun with it,'' Alex said.
They finished with 96 points, a Maniototo Area School team was second on 95 points and a Queenstown Primary team third on 94. Quiz co-ordinator and Extra! editor Ivan Behrnes said the popularity of the event remained solid and it was good to see schools like the Remarkables and the Holy Family School at Wanaka adding to the mix of schools taking part this year.
Today is the turn of year 9 and 10 pupils and 23 teams will take part. The quizzes are also staged in Dunedin, Christchurch and Timaru and more than 1300 pupils are involved.
The Otago Daily Times Extra! spelling quizzes are part of the newspaper's Class Act project, which celebrates the excellence of young people. Extra! is a monthly educational publication produced by the newspaper for senior primary, intermediate and junior secondary school pupils.
