Sisters square off in spelling bee finals

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As a dozen students fell out — one by one — of Boardman Elementary School’s spelling bee on Jan. 10, sisters Lana and Ariel Landa were the final two standing.

Lana, a fourth-grader in Gwyn Solomon’s class, engaged in a long spell-off with a peer in her age group, as her mother, Liza, anxiously watched. Lana claimed first place in fourth grade, and now it was Ariel’s turn to try for the sixth-grade title. “My husband and I were like, ‘Here we go again,’” Liza said.

Ariel, a previous fourth-grade winner representing Karen Hannon’s sixth-grade class this year, also out-spelled her opponent, as the crowd of parents started to see what was materializing.

“We got through that…and finally, when the fifth-grader misspelled a word, it was just my two daughters on the stage,” Liza said. “It was nice. We shed a few tears of joy…”

Up against each other now for the school’s spelling bee crown, Liza said her daughters seemed more relaxed than before, and encouraged one another during the roughly 15 rounds of words. Finally, Ariel misspelled “inadvertent.”

“You could see Lana’s neck like snap to her, saying, ‘No, no,’” Liza said. “She was really kind of upset that her sister misspelled a word, which was really nice to see.”

Lana had to spell just two more words to become the first fourth-grader ever to win the school’s spelling bee, but said she became very nervous when her sister got her word wrong. Ariel’s encouragement, though, powered her through.

“She said, ‘You can do it,’” Lana recalled. “She got me more pumped up when she said it to me.”

Lana navigated through “tremulous” and “Mandarin” — with a capital “M” — to become champion, and the two sisters hugged as the audience gave them a standing ovation.

Ariel said the two had studied together at home with their parents in preparation for the competition, which takes the top two spellers in each class. She and her sister would rewrite the words they got wrong to ingrain them in their heads, she added.

“I was a little upset,” Ariel said, “but I was happy for [Lana] that she won.”

Though there was no district-wide spelling bee that followed like in previous years, Lana will be competing in the Long Island Regional Spelling Bee on Feb. 5 at Hofstra University.