Battle of the Books program

Dear Families,

We are happy to announce the start of the 2016-2017 Battle of the Books program. The goals of the program are to encourage and to recognize students who enjoy reading and to broaden reading interests.

This activity is open to all fourth and fifth graders who enjoy literature. Participation in this event will require lots of extracurricular reading by your child. There are 9 pre-selected titles on the list. Participants are expected to read these books and become experts on them. It is also possible for participants and their teams to decide if they want each of their team member to read all 9 books or share the responsibility by deciding that each one of them will read particular titles from the list and become experts on just those few. Students will then read the books on the list, discuss them, quiz each other on the contents, and compete in teams of 2-4 to correctly answer the questions based on the books.

The questions used all begin with “In which book...” so that the answer will always be the title of a book. The list of books for was compiled by Battle of the Books Coordinators who tried to ensure that genres and text difficulty vary so that readers may encounter a broad range of books.

Title	Author	Genre
The one and only Ivan	Katherine Applegate	Animal Fiction
Dear Mr. Henshaw	Beverly Cleary	Realistic Fiction
Charlotte’s Web	E.B. Web	Animal Fiction
Frindle	Robert Clement	Humorous Fiction
Wonder	R. J. Palacio	Realistic Fiction
Harriet the Spy	Louise Fitzhugh	Mystery and Detective stories
Holes	Louis Sachar	Mystery, Friendship
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone	J. K. Rowling	Fantasy
Inside out Back Again	Thanhha Lai	Realistic Fiction; Novel in verse

We have already introduced this to the students in Grade 4 and 5 and many accepted the event with enthusiasm and informed us of their interest. We will be sending permission slips to parents of these students. If your child hasn't expressed their interest to us yet, it is still not too late! Please talk to them and encourage them to sign up.

Starting February we will be holding monthly practice meetings. During the meetings we will discuss the books and practice answering trivia questions about them. We will meet once a month during lunch time. Students will need to be available to attend these meetings. If a student is unable for these meetings, we can try to make alternate arrangements.

Final competition will take place during the last week in May 2017.

The children will need the support and encouragement of their families to ensure success. should you have any questions, please contact Elementary School Librarian at elemlibrarian@tashschool.org .

We are looking forward to this fun and challenging reading activity.

Sincerely,

Tina Panella, Michael Ram, Kirsten Moss, Catherine Thornton, Sayyora Tairova

Battle of the Book Coordinators