THE Kiwanis Club of New Kingston (KCNK) on Wednesday launched its Little Bee Competition that sees children at the early childhood level spell-off with the aim of developing their literacy and vocabulary skills.

Despite having to cancel last year’s competition due to the impact of the novel coronavirus, KCNK developed the Little Bee app, that would enable students to utilise their smart devices to help them study words.

The KCNK Little Bee Game can be played anywhere without an Internet connection, with two learning modes and the competition mode. Each mode has 10 levels as words progressively get larger towards the end. Each level has 15 or more words to learn. The words of a particular level are the same words for each mode.

President of KCNK Jhenell Allen said, “I am confident that the literacy level of the participants will improve significantly as they make full use of the application.”

This year participants will be required to use the Little Bee app in preparation for the competition. The Little Bee app is sponsored by GraceKennedy Money Services (GKMS) and Western Union (WU). It can be downloaded on the Google Play Store.

On June 18, KCNK will host a spell off to choose the top 10 participants on June 22; they will go head to head in the finals, which will be followed by a prize giving.

The Little Bee Spelling Competition began in 2002 under the Young Children Priority One (YCPO) committee. The YCPO projects are focused on the needs of young children. Literacy development is an important aspect of a child’s development and as such, the Little Bee Spelling Competition was born.

Over the years the competition has grown tremendously, from the first competition having six participants, to the staging in 2019 of 41 participants.