Manarat, HURDCO fight hard

Manarat School students participate in the Spelling Bee contest yesterday.Photo: STAR

Students of the city's Manarat and HURDCO schools yesterday turned up with great enthusiasm for The Daily Star Spelling Bee contest.
HURDCO International School had four intense knockout rounds before Faisal Kamal and Haseen Hasnain of class six qualified for the second phase. Faisal spelt "derision" and Haseen "anarchy" correctly to make it through the first phase hurdle.
Other spellers were knocked down in the fourth round when tricky words like "apothegm" and "cachinnate" came up.
The fifth knockout round was a tiebreaker in which Ayesha Hayder Chowdhury of class seven came out as the third top speller from the school.
An ecstatic Ayesha said she was looking to build on experience and learn from her mistakes.
The contest at Manarat International School saw Raiyan Ishrak Ahsan, Rafi Reza and Mahzabin Amin of class eight as the school's top three spellers who will be competing in the second phase.
Raiyan, Rafi and Mahzabin had to spell "concurrent," "cynicism" and "blasphemy" to be one among the top spellers.
"I practise spelling every day for about an hour and would like to be among the top six spellers," said a very determined Rafi.
The spelling contest was also held at Play Pen School where Shah Asef Aktab of class nine and Sayba Zafrin Chowdhury and Rakei Matiul Haque of class seven made it through to the second phase.
Interested students and those who have not qualified in their schools' rounds still have scope to contest in the second phase. They can log on to www.champs21.com and play online spelling games as many times as they want as only their top scores will be registered. The top scorers from the online games will also participate in the next round, which will have at least 500 participants from Dhaka division.