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3/22/06 GRAND RAPIDS -- She's a pretty cool customer for only 10 years old. Perhaps that made all the difference as Mouctika Paluri (front row, second from left) won the Greater Grand Rapids Spelling Bee. The fifth-grader at Kentwood's Endeavor Elementary School lasted more than 30 rounds, never missing a word and claiming an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington for the Scripps National Spelling Bee on May 31. "I've been a natural speller since preschool," Mouctika said while being congratulated by some of her competitors Tuesday night at the Gerald R. Ford Museum. "I could spell long words since first grade." She had stiff competition from Lydia Wassink, 12, of Tallmadge Township, who is home-schooled, and Stephanie Emmington, 14, an eighth-grader at Trinity Lutheran School in Reed City, who finished third.
Mouctika said she plans to keep up her 90-minute daily routine of having her mom read words to her and studying with spellingbee.com, the national event's Web site. She qualified for the Grand Rapids bee, sponsored by The Press, by placing second at her school bee after misspelling "junket." "I want to win," she said. "You get $500 spending money, so I want to buy some clothes and maybe a television." Aside from her bubbly charm and disarming confidence, Mouctika is a voracious reader with the gift of memory, said her parents, Ramarao and Sujana Paluri. "She's read all six of the Harry Potter books about five times, so much that I have taken them away from her and encouraged her to read something else," her father said. "Somehow when she looks at the words she can just remember them." Doug Reed, a seventh-grader at Tri-County Middle School in Montcalm County, won the Greenville bee and will go to the national event. Alix Anderson, an eighth-grader at Spring Lake Middle School, won the Tri-Cities Community Spelling Bee in Grand Haven to qualify for the national bee. See the 2006 Regional Winners Party at Craig's Cruisers 3/1/06 Regional Spelling Bee Winners What started as 30,000+ West Michigan kids was whittled down to a mere 24 top participants when the top spellers from 250+ school districts from around West Michigan traveled to 24 regional sites to battle it out. These 24 students will compete for the title of best speller in West Michigan on Tuesday, March 21st at 7:00 p.m. at the Gerald R. Ford Museum in Grand Rapids. The emerging winner will be headed to Washington, D.C. for the National Championships in June, 2006. Congratulations to these Regional Spelling Bee Winners!
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Mouctika won by spelling "larithmics," which is the study of the quantitative aspects of population.
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