I was a finalist in yesterday’s Times Spelling Bee Schools’ Championship as part of the team from Valley Gardens Middle School in Whitley Bay, Tyne and Wear. It was the first time I had visited London and all of my family came along to support me.

I have been training for months — discovering, learning and memorising new words. Whenever I come across a word I do not know on the Spelling Bee website, in a book or during a lesson, I write it down in my spelling book and, if I have a spare moment at break time or on the bus, I can flick through it and look at the words.

Writing down words first helps and as soon as I find out what a word looks like I find it much easier to learn. It is also good to know what a word means to help you to learn its spelling, so I sometimes flick through the dictionary as well.

By learning the spelling you are learning for life. My vocabulary has definitely improved since I began training for the Spelling Bee and my memory has got better. My teacher, Miss Bailey, organises lunchtime meetings for the spelling team and we test one another on words that we find difficult.

My favourite word is miscellaneous because I got that right in the first round of the local heats. I do not really have a word that I hate but the most difficult words to spell are the ones that sound easy but are in fact hard, such as epoch.

English is a complicated language and words are not always spelt how they sound, but it is best to say them how they sound rather than guess how they might be spelt.

Even the rules for spelling can cause you to make a mistake. In one of the heats, I thought beige was spelt “biege” because of the “i before e” rule so now I prefer to learn each word off by heart because some rules just do not apply.

The best method of learning how to spell is to practise little and often. Do not put too much pressure on yourself by spending hours and hours every day drilling spellings or you will become tired and bored.

The Spelling Bee is a lot more pressurised than a normal spelling test because it is more competitive. I was not the kind of person who would get up on a stage but I have begun to get used to the big cinema, bright lights and the podium at the Spelling Bee. Once you get through the first word and think, “I can do this”, then it is really fun.

You cannot learn every word so you just have to try your best. I am going to carry on learning spellings now that the final is over. There is always a new word to learn.

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