Battle of the Books

Battle of the Books is a competition where grade 6's and 7's get 8 books they are supposed to try to read. Each classroom gets 2 or three of each book. Everyone gets the books. While you are reading one of the books you are supposed to write down questions like, "In which book is there an earthquake?" There is a minimum of 10 questions for each book. We are all spit into teams. My team is called the Black Jaguars and I am the co-captain. Then once a week we meet in the library to have a "battle". Every team has large cards with pictures of all the books on them. Mrs. Clark, our librarian, asks one of the questions that someone has written and if we think know the answer, we hold the card with the answer on it up when she says go.  So the point is to read as many of the books as you can, and to write good questions because it is an advantage if your question is picked, because then of course you will know the answer. Each correct answer is worth a point, the team with the lowest amount of points is eliminated. The winning team after all the battles then moves on to compete with winning teams from other schools. Today we had a battle and my team won today with 26 points. 2nd place was a tie with 23 points. There are now only 3 teams left playing and 2 more battles. My team has been doing very well because we have 3 really good and fast readers on it and we are also very good guessers. We have either won or tied for 1st every battle so far.

There are a lot of very good books to read for Battle of the Books, I have read all of them. They try to have a mix of genras. My favourite was actually a graphic novel called Smile by Raina Telgemeier. She kind of draws with a For Better or For Worse style. It tells the true story of the author. Basically, the girl gets her two front teeth knocked out in grade 6, they try to put them back in again but the bone above them was damaged so they move up farther than all the other teeth, so then she gets a retainer with fake teeth attatched, and then she has to have braces which don't help,  then surgery, headgear, braces with rubber bands that stretch diagonally across her mouth, and then finally her teeth look normal. Well, almost normal. It says in the book they still look a little weird and then the dentist says, "We did the best we could considering we basically rearanged your entire mouth!" So while this is all going on we follow her to high school where she has to deal with an earthquake, major embarrasment, and friends that aren't so friendly. It's actually a really good book. 

My least favourite book was Ark Angel. It's a spy book, following a 14 year old spy named Alex Rider. I'm just not interested in those kind of books and it was really quite boring at some parts.

Anyway,  this is what Smile looks like: