The 2025 Santa Clara Spelling Bee challenged students across the county to spell various words in under 30 seconds in front of judges, timekeepers and a large audience. Many students stumbled under the pressure, but one local Los Altos School District student emerged victorious.
On March 8, Myna Nama, a sixth grader from Loyola Elementary School, took home the prize as the winner in the 4th-6th grade division of the competition. Every year, school districts pick one 4th-6th grader and another 7th-9th grader as their top spellers to compete in the spelling bee. The bee is open to public and private students in the county, and participants were tasked with preparing for the competition by studying the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and memorizing a spelling word sheet provided by the district.
Nama said she is no stranger to spelling bees. She once competed in a district-level bee when she lived in Colorado, and she has also recently won her school’s bee and the LASD Spelling Bee a week before the county’s event. Nama said that her teachers were supportive when it came time for her to practice. While other students were reading, she was memorizing words.
She also spent three hours a day studying the example word sheet list and asked her friends and parents for help practicing pronunciation.
“I think studying the word list a lot and getting the pronunciation was really important and then getting the roots and definitions was also helpful,” she said. “These methods help you connect some words to other ones and then you can use the spellings of the words you know to find the spellings of the words you don’t know.”
Hitesh Nama, Myna’s father, attended the event alongside his first grade son and was texting Myna’s mother live updates while she was away on a business trip. He said that he was not surprised she won; she spends hours “devouring” books and she has a natural ability to spell words and learn them in a quick amount of time.
“Most words, at least as you go up in the ranks, get pretty hard and some of these are very esoteric words – you’ve never heard of them,” he said. “I guess that comes with the competitive level. All the kids are practicing and learning these words and to figure out who’s the best, you really need to get to know the difficult words.”
Over 24 students participated in the event, but it still went on longer than he expected, Hitesh said. He said the event was expected to be three hours, but the last round, a back-and-forth of words until someone makes an error, lasted an extra half hour.
He also said in the future, he hopes the district will give students a few weeks to prepare for the county’s bee since it takes a lot of time to prepare.
“I think next year the LASD should give students an earlier heads up,” he said. “I think LASD put together something nice. I’m glad they did it, but there’s not much notice and not a lot of time to prepare, honestly, with all their homework. I bet by next year, there’s going to be a lot more kids who would participate in the school level, then the school district level and then maybe even to the county.”
Myna’s journey will continue where she will represent the county at the California State Spelling Bee Competition in San Joaquin County on April 26.
For more information on the state championships, visit sjcoe.org/StateSpellingBee.
