Austin Elementary School fourth grade student Sarv Dharavane was perfect – from “mischievous” to “dashiki” – as he won the Georgia State Spelling Bee on March 9, beating out second place finisher Matthew Baber after six head-to-head rounds.
During the course of 400 words and 18 rounds, the 10-year-old beat 19 other students and was crowned the winner of the 63rd Annual Georgia Association of Educators (GAE) State Spelling Bee. He, along with Baber, an eighth grader at Rising Star Middle School in Fayette County who was last year’s champion, will represent Georgia in the Scripps National Spelling Bee Championships in National Harbor, Md., May 26-June 1.
The road to the championship started last November in Sarv’s classroom at Austin Elementary in Dunwoody.
“I thought it would be fun, so I started looking at the school’s spelling bee list and studied the dictionary,” Sarv said. “The first word I spelled was ‘mischievous.’”
After winning the school title, Sarv moved onto the county competition, then the region followed by the state bee in March. Through all the competitions, Sarv never missed a word. Each time he advanced, he would double his efforts to gain more knowledge of word structure, language patterns and homonyms.
“I just kept on preparing, but in overdrive,” he said. “Right now, I’m studying two or three hours a day.”
During the state championship in the 18th round, Baber misspelled the word “collabent,” meaning collapsed in the middle. Sarv then was given the word “Seoul” which he spelled correctly and under the rules for the final two spellers, had to then spell another word correctly. That word was “dashiki.”
“I had no idea what a ‘dashiki’ was, so I was going on a wing and a prayer,” Sarv said. “I wasn’t sure whether I should double the ‘k’ but in the end, I got the answer right.”
Now that he’s progressed to the national…
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