Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Aaron spelling

Grammarian.

Aaron Moses wasn't sure what the word meant, but knew he'd heard it before.

So when he heard it again and was asked to spell it during the recent Nevada Spelling Bee in Reno, he only wavered for a second.

"I was about to spell it with with one M until I remembered grammar (has two)," he says.

Smart boy. Must be why the O'Callaghan Middle School eighth-grader won the bee, beating out three dozen of the state's top spellers.

At this point, he's a spelling-bee pro, having won his school, zone and county competitions before qualifying for state.

But besides a trophy, Aaron also won a trip to Washington, D.C., to compete in the national bee in May.

The Nevada competition, though, was a piece of cake, he says. "Most of the words I was getting were fairly easy," like "allocation" and "lucid."

In fact, he didn't even need the moderators to read him the definitions. "I'd seen most of the words before, so I knew how to spell them."

That's probably why he was able to keep his cool under the bee's intense pressure. "I was fine because I'm used to being drilled with questions."

So he didn't study much, just a few minutes during the long car ride north the night before.

He thinks his competition had it a little tougher, though.

"They were getting really hard words that I had never heard of. I thought, 'Aw, man, is this gonna be the next word that I miss?"'

Probably not. Aaron's been reading and spelling since he was about 3 years old.

"My parents taught me how to read syllables and every day." And when his mother read the newspaper, "she sat me on the table and I would crawl over the newspaper and point at things, little words like 'the."'

These days, he enjoys "just learning about stuff. I'm curious," he says, especially about science and history.

His English teacher, Paige Evans, thinks "he's just genuinely interested in most things."

And he's still an avid reader. "He reads all the time in my class. He always has a book with him," she says.

No wonder Aaron encourages troubled spellers to "just read a lot. If you see a word and you don't know what it means, look in the dictionary."

Playing word-association games help, too. "I don't really know how to associate things," he says, "but I just remember other things I was doing at the same time that I read (the word)."

He'll find out how well it works at the national bee, where the words get tougher.

But the stakes also are higher: $6,000 in cash and a computer.

"I was looking at the prizes and I was like, 'Whoa, I've gotta win this one," he says.

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