Reading Bowl Rolls Around Again

A sample of the books on the 2014 7th & 8th grade Reading Bowl lists. Click the image for complete listing.

Spring means junior high Reading Bowl.  Seventh grade competition started this week, and I sat in on a round with two teams from Jennifer & Tony's class and one from Bonnie & Uri's class.  Each Bowl consists of several rounds, and the six top scoring teams from the preliminaries go onto the final round, which will be next week.

Looks like "First Lines" for 300, Greg.

Reading bowl was started years ago by Jennifer and Greg (back when they taught together, if that dates it for you).  At the beginning of the school year, 7th grade and 8th grade  each get reading lists of 8 books, from which all the questions are taken.

Based on the TV game show Jeopardy, reading bowl actually started with a working Jeopardy game set programmed with answers and questions, bouncing daily doubles and the classic Jeopardy beep sounds, but these days it's gone low tech (and it works just as well).

Hmm, what was that dog's name?

Categories range from "First Lines" to "All About Anything" (aka, miscellaneous), teams choose the category and point value, and yes, there are buzzers!   The top scores bounce from team to team as right and wrong answers are offered, Jeopardy and Double Jeopardy pop up, and risky bets are taken.  The Final Jeopardy question determines everything.  Today's question -- "What is the name of the poodle in Born to Rock?"   Naomi??  No.  Good thing this JeTo class only bet 200.  Nobody knew the answer, and the high scoring team at the end was Jennifer & Tony 3.  Alas, even winning their round wasn't enough to put them into next week's Championship round.  The lowest scoring finalist had 18,400 points!

The complete Reading Bowl lists for both grades are posted in the Reading Lists section of the library catalog.  Many are available as audiobooks and ebooks as well as in print, making them accessible to a larger number of students.

Oh, and what was that poodle's name?  Why, Llama, of course!