10 Mar 2020

African Home and Restaurant will, on March 28, host a spelling bee competition for 150 primary school children from Gaborone and surrounding areas.

The event, which is brainchild of the restaurant’s sales and marketing team, would be an attempt to take the restaurant’s services to the children.

In an interview, Mr Tevin Ndlovu said the sales and marketing team chose to host the event in an effort to have more children friendly events.

He said they were working on adding educational events, specifically for young children.

“It is important that children have an opportunity to learn and compete in a supportive environment and gain skills such as improved memory and the art of presenting in public,” Mr Ndlovu said.

He said the competition would have two categories; standard three-five pupils and standard six-seven pupils.

He added that all the categories would start off at the beginners, intermediate and lastly, advanced level with eliminations across until the top three are shortlisted.

“I am convinced that this kind of competition enhances the English language in general for the participating pupils, as before and during the competitions, they get to research certain English words, their meanings and how they are used in a sentence,” he said.

He said the spelling bee was only done in English because it was difficult to divide Setswana words into different levels (beginners, intermediate and advanced) like English.

Mr Ndlovu said the use of English in many countries made it easy to value each word. Ms Tuduetso Ragontse explained that in a spelling bee competition, contestants were asked to spell a broad selection of words, usually with a varying degree of difficulty.

She added that the competitions offered a range of benefits from higher confidence to better vocabulary and help build a child’s public speaking skills.

The top three shortlisted spellers, she said, would walk away with P1000, P500 and P300 respectively.

She said each participant will pay a P50 registration fee and those who will be coming to support will pay a P50 entrance fee. ENDS