Four students from Southridge School are headed for Toronto this weekend, where they'll represent their school – and their province – at the Kids’ Lit Quiz national finals on Monday.
The foursome – Grade 7 students Serina St. James, Sarah Tisdale and Armaan Randhawa, and Grade 6 student Stephanie Lee – qualified for the literary contest after taking top spot at the provincial Kids Lit Quiz event last month at Little Flower Academy in Vancouver.
Kids Lit Quiz is an annual literary tournament aimed at promoting reading among students aged 10 to 13. At each event, the teams are asked 100 questions from 10 different categories, all of them relating to children’s literature.
“Anything written in English, aimed at children aged four to 14 is testable,” said Southridge teacher Joyce Chong, the team’s coach and also the Kids Lit Quiz convener for B.C.
“And you have no idea what you’re going to be asked. It covers comic books, pop culture, Shakespeare – all kinds of stuff.
“You really have to be well-read in order to do this.”
At the provincial tournament, Southridge’s team won after answering 74 questions correctly.
“Our kids are just fantastic readers,” said Chong. “They’re really excited to be going.”
The team has been meeting once per week since September, Chong explained. Each meeting, they pick a topic and discuss it, often quizzing each other. The team members estimate they’ve read about 100 books apiece since the beginning of the school year.
“They work very well together as a team,” she said.
The key to success, they all agree, is having a broad base of knowledge. St. James, for example, is the team’s resident Harry Potter expert, while Randhawa has the best handle on the classics – Robinson Crusoe, The Hobbit and The Jungle Book, for example.
“Each of us has a specialty, and then we just put all our knowledge together, and hope to come in first,” said Randhawa.
When reading, it’s important to retain information that you might normally not pay attention to if you were just reading for fun, he added. For example, one recent question at a tournament asked competitors which company publishes the Harry Potter series.
“You can’t just read, you have to read smart,” Randhawa said.
This year’s trip to nationals will be the second in a row for a Southridge team.
Last year, Southridge hosted provincials as part of a provincial pilot project – 15 other B.C. schools took part – and as part of that pilot project, were invited to nationals.
“But this time, we actually qualified, so it’s pretty exciting,” Chong said, adding that she hopes the Kids Lit Quiz becomes as popular here in B.C. as it is in Ontario, where upwards of 80 schools take part each year.