LAMS 7th grader Hannah Li competing March 29 at the 2025 State Spelling Bee. Courtesy/LAPS

LAPS News:

Los Alamos Middle School 7th grader Hannah Li placed 3rd at the 2025 New Mexico State Spelling Bee held March 29 in Albuquerque. She competed against 25 other students from across the state.

This was Li’s third trip to the State Spelling Bee. She placed second the last two years and has been participating in school and district spelling bees for four years.

“I have been participating in the spelling bee since I was in fourth grade,” she said. “In the 2021-2022 school year, I placed third in the Los Alamos District Bee, and didn’t go to the State Bee. In 2022-2023, I didn’t make it through the Mountain Elementary School Bee because I was sick that day.”

Li has placed first in the Los Alamos District Spelling Bee for three consecutive years.

“What I like about spelling bees is that you can learn many different words,” she said. “There are 4,000 in the word list, which means many of them will be new to you, especially the three bee words. Another thing I like about spelling bees is competing in them. It’s stressful at first, but it’s worth it. I love going up to the microphone to spell, even though I’m usually mentally exhausted afterwards.”

Li explained that the way she prepares for the spelling bee has been completely changed.

“In the first two years, I had to Google the meaning and pronunciation of almost all the words in the 4,000-word list,” she said. “It was very tiring and required multiple hours each day. Progress was very slow, as I only managed to study 17 words per day, and got around five wrong when I was tested on them.”

She added that over the last two years, the “Word Club” app has been one of the best tools to help her prepare for the spelling bee.

“It requires 1-2 hours every day from August to March, but is much easier compared to when I first started,” she said. “It helps to use a notepad and a pen and copy down the words a couple of times, doing around one page of the word list per day. My dad uses the app to test how well I know the spelling.”

Li talked about her experience at this year’s state Spelling Bee.

“After the first few rounds, and after lunch, there were six people left, and we all made it through many rounds without anyone getting a word wrong,” she said. “By this point I was mentally tired, since it had been going on for a few hours. I wasn’t paying much attention because I knew the words pretty well, even though they were all three bee words. A couple more rounds passed, and there were only four people left. We did several more rounds before getting a break.”

After the break, it was announced that they would now be going through the dictionary words, she said.

“That was basically what made me pay attention more,” Li said. “The first word I got was ‘emmetropic’, which, unfortunately, I spelled as ‘emitropic’, getting it wrong. Two people made it to the next round, and one other person spelled their word wrong. I managed to spell my next word, ‘mediatrix’ correctly, making me third.”

She added, “For the dictionary words, you just have to try and ask for the language of origin, part of speech, definition, etc., and just guess from there. Even though I didn’t manage to make it into the Scripps National Spelling Bee, I still had fun. I would definitely recommend it to someone, if they would be okay with the nervousness of competing.”

And she is planning to compete again next year.