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Fauquier County readies for Battle of the Books contest
For Mackenzie McDaniel-Neff, a good novel promises high adventure.
"Just about anything can happen in a book," says Mackenzie, a fourth grader at James G. Brumfield Elementary School in Warrenton. "It's not like real life. It's not realistic."
For Molly Avery, fiction enriches her in unexpected ways.
"It's just like whatever you read in a book, something new is going on in your life," says Molly, also a Brumfield fourth grader. "I love to read."
So it seemed only natural that the two 10 year olds would try out for Brumfield's Battle of the Books team.
Each spring teams of fourth and fifth graders from schools across Fauquier test their knowledge of 24 novels in the elementary level Battle of the Books competition.
Brumfield, the county's 10 other public elementary schools, Wakefield School near The Plains and Highland School and St. John the Evangelist School, both of Warrenton, each will send a five-member team to the April 30 meet in the Liberty High School auditorium near Bealeton.
St. John won the competition last year with a perfect score.
Each team will receive 10 questions, randomly selected by the moderator, based on novels grouped into eight categories, which range from historical fiction and humor to mystery/suspense and Virginia.
Teams will sit at card tables (probably draped with their school banners) on the LHS stage and will get 30 seconds to answer each question.
The competition rules address an array of issues, including good sportsmanship. The meet likely will draw a big and exuberant audience. Hundreds of students, parents and educators, all well behaved, packed Highland's Rice Theater for last year's event.
Brumfield Librarian Bess Robertson has led the school team for eight years.
Robertson remains devoted to the program because "it gets the children to try different genres that they necessarily wouldn't pick up" otherwise.
It produces the same results for the Brumfield librarian, who prefers historical novels and admits little interest in science fiction.
"If it helps me, I know it helps the kids try different things," Robertson says. "Battle of the Books has expanded me as well as the children.”
Last fall, 15 Brumfield students initially began attending weekly meetings at the school library. Three dropped out.
In early April, Robertson chose five team members, including Mackenzie and Molly, the team captain.
"That's the hard part," the librarian says of deciding who will represent the school.
(All schools also chose two alternates, should team members be unable to attend the meet.)
Robertson uses a point system to select the team, which this year includes four fourth graders and one fifth grader.
For example, students receive points for attending once-a-week meetings (45 minutes after school) and submitting book summaries. Students also must submit a minimum of eight book summaries and read at least one book from each of the eight categories.
As of Wednesday, Mackenzie had read 15 books and Molly 13.
Students who plow through all 24 books will have read about 5,000 pages.
Besides weekly book discussion get-togethers, the Brumfield team holds mini matches to simulate the competition experience. Kindergarten teacher Jeannie Byvik and fifth grade teachers Mollie Hess and Sylvia Settle help help Robertson coach the team.
The Brumfield librarian also created a parents battle team, which reads the books and meets periodically to discuss them. It will square off with the student team on Monday in a mock meet.
Mackenzie McDaniel-Neff's mother, Heather, belongs to the parent team, which amounts to a kind of homecoming for her.
Heather, 34, served on her Front Royal elementary school's Battle of the Books team in 1985. That year, the book list for the Warren County competition included Katherine Paterson's "Bridge to Terabithia." Her favorite book as a fifth grader, it's one of Fauquier's battle books.
Robertson's librarian colleagues do different things to prepare their teams for the annual competition, she says.
So far, her system has produced impressive results.
Brumfield has won the competition three times in the last seven years, sharing the title with M.M. Pierce Elementary School of Remington in 2006.
Brumfield's also the last to win the competition two consecutive years (2005 and 2006).
Fauquier's Battle of the Books program enjoys a long history.
Pat Downey, the school system's instructional coordinator for history and social science, launched it 32 years ago.
At the time, she had been the librarian for H.M. Pearson Elementary School near Catlett.
A book called "In What Book?", a compilation of questions and answers from the old Chicago-based radio show "Battle of the Books," inspired her, Downey recalls.
"We sort of used that as our model," Downey says of the book. "It was an attempt to create a program for children who loved to read and to expose them to a variety of books."
And the program allowed young people and adults "to talk about important issues," she said. "It's a safe way to talk about issues that are hard to talk about."
Three schools, P.B. Smith Elementary School near Warrenton, Pearson and Smith, participated in the first meet, said the former St. John librarian and Fauquier County public library director.
Fourteen will compete next Thursday.
In 1977, Downey gave little thought about whether the program would take hold.
"It was almost one of those spur-of-the-moment things," she says. "I'm just so pleased it's continuing, hopefully for another 32 years."
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