It’s been a full day of spelling at the Scripps National Spelling Bee over at the National Harbor, as the 278 participants compete to make it to the semifinals tomorrow.

The Scripps National Spelling Bee kicked off today at the National Harbor, and Virginia local Lori Anne Madison has become the youngest competitor in the contest’s 87-year history.

From today’s corrections section in the Washington Post….

Did you catch the Scripps National Spelling Bee finals on Saturday Friday? The annual event was held at the Grand Hyatt Washington over the weekend, and 13-year-old Sameer Mishra of Indiana took home top honors, which includes a $30,000 cash prize from Scripps, a $2,500 U.S. Savings Bond and a complete reference library from Merriam-Webster, a $5,000 cash prize from Sigma Phi Epsilon Educational Foundation, and a reference library worth $3,800 from Encyclopedia Britannica….

Via Best Week Ever, CNN’s Kyra Phillips Kiran Chetry learns that interviewing kids is the toughest job in news the hard way. It doesn’t help that her interviewee, Evan O’Dorney, the winner of the Scripps National Spelling Bee held here in D.C. last week, seems to be a particularly tough nut to crack. If watching a truly uncomfortable situation makes you cringe more than smile, you might want to skip this one….

Evan O’Dorney, a 13-year-old from Danville, Calif., became the 2007 Scripps National Spelling Bee champion last night. His winning word was “serrefine” — a noun describing small forceps used for approximating the edges of a wound — which he successfully spelled after a long, tense final showdown with Nate Gartke of Spruce Grove, Alberta. Gartke had hoped to become the first Canadian to win the bee. If anyone out there watched the last few rounds…

It seems like spelling bees are popular nowadays – recently we talked about the D.C. Bee spelling bee for adults, and before that there was the documentary “Spellbound” and the Starbucks tie-in movie “Akeelah and the Bee.” But today the World Series of spelling bees kicked off, and right in our backyard. The first round of the Scripps National Spelling Bee started earlier today in D.C., with the second round set for this afternoon and…