North Bend Elementary wins the 2016 Battle of the Books

Published 7:30 am Thursday, May 5, 2016

The author of which book had a writing companion by her side throughout the writing process?

North Bend Elementary students knew the answer, which scored them first place in the 2016 Snoqualmie Valley School District Battle of the Books.

Held at Fall City Elementary School on Friday, April, 29, the Battle of the Books is a reading program and trivia competition between Snoqualmie Elementary, North Bend Elementary, Opstad Elementary and Fall City Elementary.

The program was created over 10 years ago to promote reading in fourth and fifth grade students and to use friendly competition to motivate deeper reading.

Fall City Elementary Librarian Meg Handy said a book list is created by the librarians from each of the schools and teams of five are formed to answer questions based on those books. Each school holds its own elimination rounds during the year to choose the group that will represent the schools in the finals.

This year’s book list featured entries like “Rain Reign,” “Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy,” “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” and “Number the Stars.”

“The librarians get together every year and choose 12 books and we get teams of five kids each and they battle all year. We ask really hard questions,” she said. “We have 40 questions, we’ll probably stop at 20 and breathe, they have 40 seconds to answer and we have five extra questions if there is a tie.”

Each school brought 20 students to the event, five on the team and another 15 students to cheer on their classmates. North Bend Elementary had only four team members; one student was out sick.

Children sat on the floor and parents lined the walls as the battle began.

The first 20 questions resulted in a tight race as all four teams stayed relatively close to each other in points.

By the second half, Fall City Elementary’s team lost its lead to North Bend, giving them the opportunity to catch up and tie the game at the last question.

Handy then began to read the five tiebreaker questions; the team with the most points at the end of the five questions would be the winner.

Tensions rose as both Fall City and North Bend answered the first three questions correctly and both missed the fourth.

The fifth question, “the author of which book had a writing companion by her side throughout the writing process?” gave the win to North Bend.

Calvin Cole and Riley Miller, on the North Bend team, said the end of the battle was very stressful — they were scared of getting into a situation that would leave them without enough questions to catch up.

“We won by one point so it was very stressful. Even when they were two points ahead, I was really worried because we know from experience that there is a point where there are no more questions and there is no way for the other team to win,” Cole said.

“And then we caught up by about three points,” Miller added.

As for the answer to the final question? It was “Rain Reign” by Ann M. Martin.