HAHIRA — The Upper School Battle of the Books team at Valwood School won the inaugural GISA state championship for Georgia and tied with Northwood School from Summerville, SC, for the SECIS (Southeastern Conference of Independent Schools) Battle of the Books regional championship that was held Thursday, Jan. 18, via Zoom.
Valwood’s team is the first Georgia high school to compete in the nationwide competition. The team, composed of 14 students, placed second in the initial phase of the competition, earning 51 points to Northwood’s 54 points. The Valiants moved on to the competition’s second phase championship round and tied Northwood at 27 points.
Participants included senior Wesley Clark; juniors Hannah Ward, Sienna Persaud, Grant Moss, Josh Hammett, and Anabella Paulk; sophomores Ava Garrett, Destyn Lain, William Holloway, Haley Hardy, Annabel Musgrove, and Harper Dasher; and freshmen Ellyse Persaud and Julia Soshnik. The faculty advisors included Valwood Upper School English teachers Doni Ray, Kim Teasley, and Linden Hammett.
Battle of the Books is a voluntary reading incentive program for students in grades three through 12. The competition encourages students to read good books and have fun while competing with their peers. Valwood’s students each read four or five books from the 15-book list that included such titles as Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” and Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”
Students answered questions about setting, characters, plot events, and identified specific quotations from the assigned texts. They had 30 seconds to answer each question and participated in a total of 12 rounds in phase one and three rounds in the championship phase.
Ray, a 42-year teaching veteran, said, “I’ve told the kids that this is inspirational because what they have done will inspire others to read and that’s what we want more of everywhere. Solid readers, happy readers, enthusiastic readers are so much fun!”
She continued, “We want to graduate competent, enthusiastic readers because that skill sets them up for success no matter what they do.”
The Valwood English department carefully curates a wide selection of texts for literary instruction, but the participants of the Battle of the Books competition noted how thrilled they were to be challenged in a different way for their reading accomplishments.