Serving the Forreston area since 1865
FORRESTON Journal March 3, 2016 Volume 153, Number 45 - $1.00
Three Point Contest
$500 Basket
What’s Cookin’
Two Forreston athletes competed in the girls three point showdown Feb. 25. B1
A Junior High student won $500 after making a long shot. A10
An annual cooking showcase and competition returns to Barnacopia March 12. A6
Unique crafts created Feb. 27 By Chris Johnson cxjohnson@oglecounty news.com Unique crafts were created with only minor setbacks Saturday morning. The Ogle County 4-H members were participating in the Day of Dabbling at the Oregon Church of God. This is an event where the older 4-H members create projects that can be taught and completed in less than an hour. One of these projects was being co-run by Jacob Ebens, Oregon. “I learned a lot about organization today,” he said. “I also learned how to run an event.” At his station, 4-H members were creating a stained glass design using melted crayon shavings and a stencil. “The iron station slowed the project down,” said Ebens. “One iron stopped working.” Fortunately for Ebens the 4-H members were patient and everyone was able to complete most of the project. “Some stencils still needed to be glued and cut,” said Ebens. Another project involving
Tractor Day The annual Forreston FFA tractor day was held Feb. 26 at Forreston High School. Students were invited to drive their tractors to school to display them in the front parking lot. Above, one of the smallest tractors brought to the school was a garden tractor. At right, are a pair of orange Allis-Chalmers tractors. Photos by Chris Johnson
“4-H teaches you how to go with the flow and adapt so we adapted.” — Natalie Carlson Byron crayons also had a meltdown during the event. “One of our heat guns failed,” said Natalie Carlson, Byron. “It made it hard to get everything done.” Her workshop was melted crayon art. Crayons are placed around a blank canvas and melted by a heat source, like a hair dryer or heat gun. “4-H teaches you how to go with the flow and adapt so we adapted,” she said. Originally there were four people per station and this station, but because of the broken heat gun, six had to share the remaining two hair dryers. “It worked out in the end,” said Carlson. The idea for this project was from a Pinterest post Carlson viewed. “I learned how to make the crayon art and made the samples,” she said. Turn to A3
Polo speller earns a second trip to Washington DC By Chris Heimerman Sauk Valley Media cheimerman@sauk valley.com For nearly three hours and 37 rounds, Rebekah Zeigler did all she could to keep the blood from rushing to her head. When Tom Wadsworth, emcee of the first combined Lee-Ogle-Whiteside Regional Spelling Bee, turned and announced to the Centennial Elementary School fifth-grader, “You’re going to Washington!”, she put her hands on her cheeks and dragged her fingers down to reveal bright red streaks – streaks of relief, no doubt. In spelling scullion correctly Feb. 25, the defending Lee-Ogle champ from Polo again punched her ticket to the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which will be held May 22 to 27 in National Harbor, Maryland. She also survived a showdown with three other spellers – eventual runnerup Mariam Elahmady of River Bend Middle School in Fulton, Aaliyah Gaffey of Challand Middle School in Sterling, and Rebekah Starwalt of Byron Middle School – that began in Round 14 and lasted the subsequent 13 rounds. Typically, Wadsworth waits for the final three spellers to bring them to the front of the stage, but after the quartet, along with
Taylor Miller, Forreston, duked it out for five rounds, until Miller bowed out on the word quisling – she went with the double-z – he brought the foursome to the front after Round 15. He obviously knew the talent that was on hand. So did the defending champion. “They were really, really good spellers,” she said. “I started sweating and got really nervous that I would spend one wrong.” But she relied on two tried-and-true techniques to prevail. First, she clasped her hands together and told herself she was “cool, calm, and in control,” a trick she learned at Gymnastics Divine in Dixon. “Only I couldn’t bite my nails this time, because I painted them,” she said. Understandable, given the packed auditorium at Dixon High. Second, every time she stoically approached the microphone and heard her word, she “wrote” the word on the back of her number card as she spelled it. Gaffey, an eighth-grader, used a similar technique, only she “scribbled” on her hand. At one point, she showed incredible resolve by getting halfway through phenomenon, getting stuck, then starting over. Spellers can do that, as long as they don’t change the letters they’ve already
In This Week’s Edition...
spoken. But she spelled her 26th word of the day, vivaci, with an “e” on the end. “You did extremely well today,” Wadsworth said. Two rounds later, fatigue set in for the sixth-grader from Byron. Starwalt, smooth until that point, swapped the “i” and the “u” in prosciutto. “I don’t know how to spell it, either,” Wadsworth said as he comforted her. When he later presented
her with her prizes – a $50 Amazon gift card and a Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary – he joked, “as if she’ll ever need it.” When Elahmady rattled off nenuphar, and Zeigler followed by nailing bobbejaan in the next round, Wadsworth wiped his forehead, looked over and smiled with disbelief. Dr. Ahmed Elahmady wasn’t surprised. His daughter spends two hours a
day studying her words, and even has her words on her phone, so she can study on the go. “She’s a very smart kid,” he said. “She takes after her mother.” But having gone through all the words Wadsworth could have imagined the students would need, he was forced to move on to a list they hadn’t been privy to. They’re given a list of about 1,500 words to agonize over in advance, and he had
to go off that list. “I’m not exaggerating when I say the words were harder this year, and the students were better this year, than I’ve seen in 34 years,” he said. “This bee had better spellers who advanced farther than anyone had ever done in this contest. There was a percentage of kids who were more prepared than we’d ever seen.” “I would’ve been lost after Round 1,” Turn to A9
Forreston fourth grader Miles Gordon takes a turn spelling Forreston seventh grader Taylor Miller steps up to the Feb. 25 at the Regional Bee. Photo by Alex Paschal mike at the Regional Bee. Photo by Alex Paschal
Business Briefs, A4 Church News, A5 Classifieds, B5-B10 Entertainment, A6
Marriage Licenses, A4 Public Voice, A7 Property Transfers, B4 Sheriff’s Arrests, B3
Social News, A4 Sports, B1, B2 State’s Attorney, B3 Weather Forecast, A2
Published every Thursday by Ogle County Newspapers, a division of Shaw Media • www.oglecountynews.com
Deaths, B4 Jacqualin F. Bowers