As first-time participants in the 2016 Oregon Battle of the Books, where
teams of students from various schools read books and answer questions
about them to earn points, elementary and middle school students from the
Welches Schools more than held their own. And even though the middle
school team won both its matches, they didn’t make it to the next round,
falling just short of scoring enough points to be one of the 16 teams that
advanced.

When reflecting on their performance, seventh grader Griffin McAbery noted
there was one question he had to answer that he’d like to have back.

The question was to identify the product a company makes in a book he read.
McAbery answered, “fruit snacks,” while the correct response was, “chemical
weapons.”

“I should have been thinking of the right company,” McAbery, 12, said with a
laugh.

Each team received 16 books in October, including titles such as
“Stormbreaker,” by Anthony Horowitz, “Famous Last Words,” by Katie
Alender, and “The Roar,” by Emma Clayton for the middle school team and
“Mountain Dog,” by Margarita Engle, “Escape From Mr. Lemoncello’s Library,”
by Chris Grabenstein, and “How to Train Your Dragon,” by Cressida Cowell for
the elementary school team. The teams first met in December and got
together once a week to practice, ramping up to meeting every day in the
week prior to the early March competition.

Fifth grader Jack Padberg, 11, noted the elementary team, called the “The
Mountain Bookaroos,” should have offered a challenge to some of the
questions, including one where they correctly answered that a hinge was used
to pry open the seal of a skylight in one book, but were told they were wrong.

Sixth grader Inanna Vognild, 12, noted the middle school team, “The Reading
Wildcats,” encountered some questions that asked for highly specific details,
including the address of a school in one book and the name of a newspaper in
another.

“(It’s) not something you look for when you’re reading normally,” she said.
The school plans on participating next year and wants to expand it to more
teams and students, with a school competition to determine which team goes
to the regional competition.