GUILDERLAND -- Four Farnsworth Middle School students will be among the 107 students competing in the Capital Region Spelling Bee at Proctor’s Theatre in Schenectady on Tuesday. The student who wins the bee at Proctors will go on to the national competition in Washington, D. C.

All four are naturally good at spelling. And that’s just as well, because they take part in so many activities at school that they don’t have a lot of time left over to actually study spelling.

Enrichment teacher and spelling-bee coordinator Alicia Malanga said, “They’re all very active, well-rounded individuals.” They have all taken various enrichment classes both before school and during the school day, she said.

Eighth-grader Aidan Doyle plays both trombone and string bass and is president of the select choir, the jazz ensemble, and the select band. He is in two Empire State Youth Orchestra groups: the youth orchestra and the repertory jazz ensemble. He is also in the school orchestra and the select choir, and he plays soccer.

Joanna Chen, who is he seventh grade, plays tennis and is in ski club, takes dance lessons, and plays cello; she also attends Math Counts practices for tryouts for a national math competition and, on Sundays, attends Chinese school.

Maia Regan, also a seventh-grader, takes dance lessons and plays violin in the orchestra, chamber strings, and select strings. She sings in the chorus and is in the musical.

Amol Kumar, in the eighth grade, said that his older brother went to the spelling bee years ago, “and I looked up to him.” In fifth grade, he says, he started “noticing spelling.” He challenged himself, he says, and asked his teacher for difficult words to study. Recently, in preparation for the bee, he has been studying the box of flashcards the school provided, and asking his mother or father to quiz him.

Asked if they have any tricks they use to make sure they are spelling a word right, Maia said, “I picture it in my head, how it would look in a book.”

Joanna agreed, saying, “If I don’t know the word, I try to picture what seems right, and ask for the language of origin.”

Aidan said, “I take a really long time. It sounds obnoxious and I hate when other people do it, but I ask for everything possible.” Contestants can ask the judges for the word’s language of origin, its definition, and an example of how it is used in a sentence. “If I didn’t do that,” Aidan said, “I wouldn’t have gotten this far.”

He added, “One time I asked them for the spelling. They were not amused.”

Amol’s approach is simple. He likes to “think it through until I’m 100-percent sure,” he said.