A Long, Hot Spell for Child Stars : Education: The words weren’t elementary although the contestants were. Winners had to bee letter-perfect.

What Joe Montana is to the Super Bowl, Cynthia Hernando is to a spelling bee--accurate and possessed of steely nerves. And a winner.

She displayed all her talents Thursday night, joining two other students to cop top honors at the Eighth Annual Orange County Elementary Spelling Contest. Through round after round, word after word, Cynthia ticked off all the right letters, even tackling such personal nemeses as peninsula.

“At first I didn’t think I was going to do well at all,” Cynthia said after the contest, hugging her parents, Cecilia and Cesar Hernando. Then, trophy in hand, the sixth-grader from Walter Knott Elementary School in Buena Park began to cry.

She will be joined by Tara Nathan, a sixth-grader from Vista Verde Elementary in Irvine, and Gabriel Knoy, a sixth-grader from Barcelona Hills Elementary in Mission Viejo, on a trip to the state spelling finals in Santa Rosa on May 12.

More than 60 students from 20 public school districts in 26 private schools participated in the contest, which was coordinated by the Orange County Department of Education and sponsored by the the county Board of Realtors.

The students, all of them from grades 4 through 6, kicked off the evening by taking a ticklish written test of 20 words.

Each child was given a clipboard and pencil, and a prompter read them off: daffodil, mammoth, livelihood, cupboard and chocolate. The students then had 15 seconds to write down their answers.

As the seconds ticked down, the children huddled over their clipboards, pencils working furiously, their little brows furrowed in concentration. When time expired, a bell was rung and the prompter chimed, “Pencils up!” Scores of tiny arms were thrust toward the ceiling.

Afterward, the contestants were herded into a back room for a snack while district officials toted up the scores.

Farhana Haque, 9, leaned back in a folding chair, dipped a plastic spoon into a cup of vanilla ice cream and pored over a list of the 20 words handed out after the written test was concluded and passed in.

“I didn’t get ‘crochet’ or ‘adequate’ right,” Farhana noted, hardly ruffled. “But it was fun.”

Eighteen out of 20 is better than most adults would do, but it wasn’t even good enough to get Farhana into the final round of 30. Fifteen students got all 20 words right, while another 15 misspelled only one word.

But it was the final round, an old-fashioned spelling bee with all the tension of the seventh game of the World Series, that separated the best and brightest of the bunch.

Tony Natividad held a videotape camera to his eye as his daughter, Cherylmae, strode to the stage for her turn. Though the Cypress sixth-grader missed a word and was eliminated early on, her father was understandably proud of her efforts.

“She loves to engage in mental gymnastics,” he said. “She’s always been a good speller. We spent only about 10 minutes a night. Got out the old dictionary.”

The students zipped through words such as bridge, degree and blister. But one by one, they began to fall out as toughies such as percolate, eloquence, persecute and megalopolis came up. The three finalists rose to the top as an unlucky youngster added a “u” to yacht.

Robert Peterson, county schools superintendent, said the program is a great impetus for students, a welcome reward for using their brains.

“It’s a way to accentuate the academic in a world in which diversions are so powerful,” Peterson said. “Most children these days watch about five hours of TV a day. These students, though, are spending some of that TV time on their books. That’s what we want to emphasize.”