All of us face challenges in life. I know I do.

All of us face challenges in life. I know I do. I’m going to tell you three important challenges I faced in my lifetime. One of them was making friends at a new school. The second one was winning the spelling bees. The last one was being on TV and the newspaper.

When my fourth grade year was over, my mom and my brothers and sisters moved to Immokalee with my mom’s new husband. He was extremely nice. The school year was about to begin so, I had to find a new elementary school to attend for fifth grade. I decided to go to a school named V.O.E which stands for Village Oaks Elementary. I made friends the second I walked into my fifth grade class. I got along with almost everybody. I even made a best friend named Daisy. Later on, I got tired of living over there and wanted all my old friends back so, I moved back to Naples.

When I got back to Naples, I returned to my old elementary school, Lake Park Elementary. Towards, the end of my fifth school year, the school was having a spelling bee, and everyone had to participate. I didn’t think I would win until I realized a smart challenge student and I were the only ones left. He misspelled a word, and I was afraid that I was going to misspell the word, and I was going to be embarrassed. I spelled the word correctly and I won a trophy. The following year, I entered the spelling bee and, sadly, I lost, but the year after that I won by spelling an extremely difficult word - miscellaneous!

I was a smart kid, and I knew big and extremely hard words, I was in this program for smart and intelligent kids. I was the youngest one. They taught us college words. I wanted to quit the program when they told us that we were going to be on TV. I was scared. We were also going to be performing in front of the school board. I thought they would yell at me if I did something wrong, but actually they were pretty nice. I made the front page of the newspaper when I said all the 52 hard words correctly, while the rest of older kids got stuck on like the fourth word. I felt really confident while the audience were greeting me and complimenting me on what a good job I did.

Now you know the challenges I faced. Let me summarize for you. The first one was when I moved to Immokalee and had to make new friends. The second one was winning the spelling bees. The last one was being on TV and the newspaper. What challenges did you face?

By L. J., a middle school student