Battle of the Books

[Suzanne Dix]

Hi - Does anyone do a Battle of the Books tournament? I'm looking for some new ideas to go along with the one we run...new book titles...new incentives...etc. Thanks!

[Ashley Stang]

I'm very interested in this topic. How does one hold a Battle of the Books? Last year I held a Readathon, but maybe this would be better for my book club?

[Suzanne Dix]

The way we do it is to have 20 titles set aside (4-5 copies) for our 5th graders. They get the book titles over the summer and have until January to read them. Then all 5th graders join a team of 3-4 students and compete in trivia contests based on the books. We do the same for our 6th & 7th graders too.

[Ashley Stang]

Ah, this sounds similar to the county-wide Reading Olympics that we participate in. If you visit the Montgomery County Intermediate Unit's website, you could look for their RO booklist for the middle school(?) for this school year. Maybe that would have some different titles for you.

[Suzanne Dix]

Thanks! I'll do that!

[Melinda Pennington]

In North Carolina, we have a statewide program for elementary and middle schools. Librarians and teachers across the state create a list (some old classics, award winners, state connections, recently popular, and of course, curriculum related, and usually at least one interesting non-fiction). Schools build their teams however they choose and then compete at a local, regional, and state level. We have to develop our own questions to study and they have to have a very structured format. Usually, there is about 25-27 titles on the list. I used a wiki that the students and I could contribute to, which worked fairly well.

[Suzanne Fox]

We do the Battle of the Books with our fourth graders. I think you could do the same model successfully with 5th or 6th graders too. We (librarians from 4 local independent schools) create a list of 40 books (about 10 books go off and to replace every year, with an effort to keep books on for about 3 years). We write questions for each book and then have a big event at night at one of the schools. Kids are placed on mixed teams and the focus is a celebration of reading. Our students have to read 10 books to qualify...everyone does because they have six months or so to read. There are a range of books on the list, easy to hard, wide range of content, diverse range of author/character voices, with careful attention paid to authentic multicultural literature. I think I've attached a copy of our Battle list from this year.

[Urania Beyer]

I did an adapted version some years ago with 7th and 8th grade students. Since we had only 2 months to run it, the LA teacher and I decided to use only 5 books. We had a list of suggested titles, did a book talk and the students chose 5 titles. We then devided them i groups of 3. They read all 5 books, and had to come up with at least 3 questions about the book. We collected all the questions and addded our own. There were two rounds - one in each individual grade level, and them the final one being 7th grade versus 8th grade. As for the prizes, the studetns donated goodies to a basket, and we added Amazon gift cards, that was given to the winner. By the way, the 7th graders won.