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Students Spell Their Way To Success At Jungle Island

MIAMI (CBSMiami) – Hundreds of local students participated in the Miami-Dade/Monroe County Spelling Bee held Wednesday at Jungle Island.

CBS4′s Josh Benson and Vanessa Borge emceed the championship along with Miami Herald columnist Ana Veciana-Suarez.

The champions of the middle school competitions will represent Miami-Dade/Monroe and Broward counties at the 2013 Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington D.C.

"That's what you then see on ESPN, where the kids are really excited," said Burger King Corporation Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer Jerrell M. Moore. "It's kind of like the Superbowl of spelling!"

The middle school champions in Broward and Miami-Dade will also receive a free one-year subscription to the Encyclopedia Britannica Online for Kids, the Samuel Louis Sugarman Award, a $100 Series EE U.S. Savings Bond and a Webster's Third New International Dictionary. The elementary school champions will receive Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition.

When asked if she was nervous Coral Gables Preparatory Academy 4th Grader Anna Friedman, responded "Yes. Really nervous." But her nerves didn't get in her way. She won the elementary school spelling bee competition.

Some of the words students had to spell included: parachronism, multifarious, rubescent, etc.

Jonathan Elisabeth, a 5th grader at Princeton Christian School, was the runner up in the elementary school competition. He says his success was all about strategy.

"Some languages have different ways of spelling words so I'd study the words and roots and origins [of the words] to full understand the words," Elisabeth said.

The winner of the middle school spelling be was Shayaan Subzwar, a 6th grade student at Sunny Isles Beach Comm. School.

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