Battle of the Books 2018

Thank you ladies for your supportive comments on my last post. I am not sure what I am going to do about babysitting yet...but I am leaning toward not watching her. The last 2 days I haven't had her and I have been so much less stressed out. It really does make a difference. But again I just wanted to say thank you for the support; it really does help! 

Another area of stress this week (and for the past 5 months or so) has been "Battle of the Books" for this year. Battle of the Books is a reading competition, where teams of 5-9 players from area 5th grades read a total of 88 books and then in a round robin competition answer questions identifying titles and authors. This year every county school had a team and competed in the competition. Because of it's growth, they held a preliminary competition on Tuesday night to eliminate 4 of the 12 teams. 

In November I became the coach for the Pleasant Street team, kind of out of necessity. Rebecca loves to read and she has been excited to be on the team since last summer. It came down to no one was stepping up to be the coach and they were the only school in the county not to have a coach, so.... I stepped in so that Rebecca could take part. 

I am being honest when I say that it was a struggle. We had lots of drama--- kids quitting after a few weeks, kids not reading when they were asked to, a child quitting 3 weeks before the finale. It was rough. 

However, we persevered and on Tuesday our team of 5 went into the preliminaries against 5 other schools. (They split the competitors into 2 different locations and they took the top 4 from each location for the finals.) 

I will be completely honest and say that I didn't hold much hope that we would move on. It was nerve-wracking. The girls did poorly in some rounds and did well in other ones. Well, we were the last team in from our prelims. The girls were so excited! 

So that meant that on Thursday night, we all went to the Memorial Theater for the finals. It was another nerve-wracking, LONG night. There were 7 rounds with 4 games in each round. In each game 10 questions were asked. 

Again, the first round was brutal and the last round was really brutal (the questions got harder each round). In the last round the coaches in front of where I was sitting and the coach right behind me didn't know any of the answers either so it was brutal for ALL the teams. 

The girls on our team did okay. They did better than I thought that they would. They came in 6th overall in the competition. 

It was a learning experience for me and Rebecca. She loved every minute of it and now has some favorite new books-- including Hatchet and Project Mulberry! I am so glad that I took on the role of coach, even though it was stressful and caused me lots of headaches. I am happy that I was able to help fulfill Rebecca's dream of being on the Battle of the Books team.