Battle of the Books!
I've been wanting to launch a Battle of the Books for a few years now, and am very excited that we were able to successfully complete one over the past few months.
If you're interested in doing one at your library, here's how we ran ours:
25 books were chosen by myself and my colleague in the library. We chose them based on a few different genres, not just the super popular ones.
We had the students form 4 teams (We have four School Houses so it was easy to divide them up)
Each team had 6 members. (This helped when a few students couldn't make it to the final event due to other commitments)
After the teams were made, we gave the students the list of books and roughly four months to prepare. We tried to have regular check ups with them each month to remind them.
The tournament itself was made of a Semi-Final and a Final Round.
On the first day, we pitted two of the teams against each other. These were chosen randomly out of a hat. Then on the next day, we had the other two teams compete, the winners from the two days competed in the finals. We held ours at lunch which was fun but meant limited time to complete the games.
The Semi-Final ran this way:
The Final Round ran similar to the Semi Final Round except we ran another Battle Round at the end for fun.
In the end, the Battle of the Books required us to create over 200 questions, 10 questions for each book to make sure that we didn't run out, especially if there was a tie.
It was a lot of work and preparation but well worth it.
This year, Turing House was the big winner, defeating Morris house 89 to78.
My goal is to expand this event so that the winning house can compete with a team from a nearby school!
If you're interested in doing one at your library, here's how we ran ours:
25 books were chosen by myself and my colleague in the library. We chose them based on a few different genres, not just the super popular ones.
We had the students form 4 teams (We have four School Houses so it was easy to divide them up)
Each team had 6 members. (This helped when a few students couldn't make it to the final event due to other commitments)
After the teams were made, we gave the students the list of books and roughly four months to prepare. We tried to have regular check ups with them each month to remind them.
The tournament itself was made of a Semi-Final and a Final Round.
On the first day, we pitted two of the teams against each other. These were chosen randomly out of a hat. Then on the next day, we had the other two teams compete, the winners from the two days competed in the finals. We held ours at lunch which was fun but meant limited time to complete the games.
The Semi-Final ran this way:
- We had a Battle Round & a Lightning Round
- In the Battle Round We asked questions that began with "In which book would you find..." or something similar. In these questions they were given clues and had to name the book, they are open to each team. Students had to slap a buzzer (touch light) if they knew the answer.
- After that round was complete, we launched the Lightning Round. Each team had their own Lightning Round. They have two minutes and thirty seconds to answer as many questions as they can on the books.
- We tried to get through 3 Battle & 3 Lightning Rounds but since we held ours at lunch, we sometimes ran out of time. If this was the case, we simply let the team with the most points win. To make things simple, teams got 3 points for correctly guessing both a Battle & Lightning Round question. Half points were awarded where applicable.
The Final Round ran similar to the Semi Final Round except we ran another Battle Round at the end for fun.
In the end, the Battle of the Books required us to create over 200 questions, 10 questions for each book to make sure that we didn't run out, especially if there was a tie.
It was a lot of work and preparation but well worth it.
This year, Turing House was the big winner, defeating Morris house 89 to78.
My goal is to expand this event so that the winning house can compete with a team from a nearby school!
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