The 2009-2010 Gleaner's Children's Own Spelling Bee kicks off today with parish finals in St Elizabeth and Manchester.

The St Elizabeth final begins at 9 a.m. at the St Matthew's Anglican Church Hall, while Manchesterians can turn out to the Mandeville Parish Church at3 p.m.

Last year's overall winner, Shari-Jo Miller, who represented Jamaica at the Scripps National Championships in Washington, DC, was from Man-chester. She was eliminated in the fourth round of the final, where she placed 37th out of the 293 spellers.

St Elizabeth's winner, Andrew Williams, a student of Glen Stuart Primary, was one of the youngest spellers in the competition.

Gone global

This year's staging of the Spelling Bee is the 51st renewal of the competition, which produced an interna-tional winner in Jody-Anne Maxwell, who took the trophy in 1998 and has remained the only Jamaican to do so.

Tomorrow, the Spelling Bee bus rolls into Clarendon's St Gabriel's Anglican Church at 9 a.m. and later into Kingston at the head office of The Gleaner Company.

The Gleaner's Children's Own Spelling Bee 2009-2010 is open to spellers aged 14 and under who attend school in Jamaica and would not have passed grade eight on February 1, 2010.

tennesia.malcolm@gleanerjm.com