This week marked the I-don't-know-how-many-times-we've-held-this annual Quiz Bowl. I blog about this every time we do it.
In 2024, it was held at Macklin PS with five schools participating.
In 2023, it was held at Chief Dan George PS with seven schools participating.
In 2022, it was held virtually with four schools participating.
We didn't hold it in 2021 or 2020, because of the pandemic.
It was a bit of a concern that the Quiz Bowl would even happen this year. I nearly dropped out because I didn't have enough students reading the Silver Birch Fiction or Yellow Cedar nominees for 2025. To my horror, no one in my whole school qualified to vote in the Silver Birch Fiction category (an embarrassing fact I shared with OLA and it was noticed!) Instead, one keen Grade 5 student and I looked at the list of students that had read Silver Birch Express books and invited some students personally by asking them if they'd be willing to read some extra books in May so that we could field a team from Agnes Macphail Public School.
This was not just an anomaly at my school. We had to alter the original rules to allow students older than Grade 6 to participate, so that some schools would have enough readers. We originally had nine schools sign up for the event, but it dropped to five by the time the day rolled around. Big thanks to:
- Chief Dan George Public School
- Milliken Public School
- Percy Williams Junior Public School
- Port Royal Public School
for participating this year.
Our host school was Port Royal Public School and the day of our event was May 20, 2025 (the day after Victoria Day). Our guest author was George Chiang, co-creator of The Longest Shot: How Larry Kwong Changed The Face of Hockey.
All the teacher-librarians took turns fulfilling different roles. Salma Nakhuda handled the buzzer system. Alyson Walters was the host. Jackie Dixon and I took turns watching the audience. All of us read the questions we invented for our assigned books. Kim Davidson was primarily in charge of keeping score and she commented afterwards that this year was the first she's seen in a while where all the teams were evenly matched. She revealed that in the Fiction competition, coming into the final book and the last ten questions of the match, that there was a three-way tie for first place. Our eventual winners were:
- Yellow Cedar Non-Fiction = Milliken AND Port Royal (yes, a tie!)
- Silver Birch Fiction = Agnes Macphail
The irony is not lost on me. I was shocked and surprised that my school took first place. Even though we are one of the founding schools for the Forest of Reading Quiz Bowl, this is only our third or fourth win and the only time we have earned the prize for the Silver Birch Fiction competition. Congratulations to all the schools for their efforts. I know we are going to have to hold a serious conversation about how to sustain this event and what changes we might need to make to help it survive.
This past week was also my final class for my Media AQ course, where I am a student. It is my last one because I was in the Specialist Media AQ course, and based on the 3-part AQ structure we have in Ontario, there are no other classes available. To be honest, I was fortunate enough to be in this cohort, because the Association for Media Literacy is the only provider of the Media AQ course in Ontario and it doesn't run every season.
I want to publicly thank both my instructors (Neil Andersen, Carol Arcus, and Michelle Solomon), and the members of my Part 3 cohort (Greta Smelko and Wade Blanchette). I can't say enough positive things about these folks. They are all so hardworking! Even though we all live in different cities, on Mother's Day, Greta and I drove to Wade's house in St. Catharines, Ontario, so that we could work on our group project.
When I mentioned to Neil about the number of potential projects we had under consideration, he explained that he started working with Carol Arcus on projects and over thirty years later, hasn't stopped! I don't mind taking a pause on assignments for the time being - I've got lots of projects on the go right now, like the yearbook, the grad slideshow, and all my evaluations for report cards - but I really, really hope I get to work with these amazing educators again in the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment