Kids off to reading ‘Olympics’
Four Christchurch pupils are about to take on the world in a competition aiming to breath life into reading as people drop books for devices.
The Cathedral Grammar School pupils emerged victorious at the Kids’ Lit Quiz over 2000 other young Kiwis. The winners received $200 each, and a collective $12,000 to travel to the world finals in Canberra, Australia, next week.
Year 7 student Kohei Wada said he was “still in a state of shock”. “I’ve done this for about three years now and I’ve always thought that this was such a big achievement, and now we’ve actually done it.”
His team-mates – year 8 students Bea Simpson-Bannister, Emily Fergusson and Heather Walker – worked well together and covered many categories, he said. They trained weekly and were avid readers, with Wada able to demolish an addictive book in five hours, or a trilogy in a week. He appreciated the Kids’ Lit Quiz for breathing life into reading. Simpson-Bannister, who could churn through a good book in two days, said it “felt like a dream” to progress so far in the competition. Their main goal was to “just have fun”, but it would not hurt to beat the Cathedral Grammar team that placed fourth in the 2008 world finals, she said.
Regional heats are conducted like a pub quiz, but the national and world finals adopt a buzzer-style competition. Practice questions included “who is the girl that looks after Clifford the big red dog?”, “what type of bird was Pigwidgeon?” and many obscure ones.
Cathedral Grammar head of literacy Natasha Leith said the team was now rereading books, and “may have read a book five times”. Winning nationally was a “huge success” for the pupils as they approached the “absolute peak” of their reading careers.
She was “proud and excited for them because this is what they’ve been working for, some of them for three of four years”.
Principal Scott Thelning thanked Kids’ Lit Quiz founder Wayne Mills, who started the quiz, dubbed the “Olympics of reading”, in 1991 after noticing school prizes “were all given for rugby and netball”.