Meet in the Middle: Battle of the Books
For a long time I wanted to create a battle of the books competition for our middle school students. We have an elementary competition that creates a lot of buzz and interest and then it dies when they get to middle school. I wanted to continue to foster that excitement when they get to 6th grade and beyond, but with only two middle schools in the district I needed buy-in from the other middle school librarian. One of my good friends who was also an elementary librarian in our district applied for the middle school librarian position and suddenly I had a partner to make this happen!
In November we started talking about it and decided to throw caution to the wind and make it happen this school year as sort of a trial run to see how it would go. With only two middle schools it’s definitely easier to manage and get started. Shout out to Brooke King in Humble ISD (@brooke_bking) for sharing their district’s battle of the books rules to help us figure out some logistics. In our district there is a bit of a rivalry/competition between our two middle schools since there’s only two. We did not want to feed into this so we decided to have multiple teams from each campus and each team was competing against the other—not our school vs. her school. We had an informational meeting in December and created a shared Canvas course so students would be up-to-date with meeting times, Quizizz practice links, and when the battle was. We decided to start having in-person practices in March. This gave students December to March to read the books so they could be ready to answer questions on all the titles. We asked for at least 2 team members and no more than 5 to comprise a team. They needed to choose a team captain and team name by March as well. Next year we will have the titles picked out sooner, thus allowing more time for teams to be created and read the books before in-person practice begins.
The titles we chose were from multiple genres (mystery, realistic fiction, humor, fantasy, etc.), multiple formats (novel, graphic novel, story collection, novel-in-verse) and interest level (middle grade and young adult). We didn’t want a lot of YA titles on this list since there are usually a lot of 6th graders who wanted to create battle teams and they might not be ready for those novels yet. We will follow the same format for the 2023-2024 books this summer. The titles we chose were newer ones. I looked at the state award lists (for Texas that’s Bluebonnet books for elementary, Lone Star books for middle school, and the Mavericks graphic novel list for middle and high school). We also wanted to make sure multiple ethnicities, backgrounds, experiences in both books and authors were represented. The other middle school librarian and I read all the titles, wrote at least 100 questions for them (if possible depending on the length of the book) and choose which questions we would use for the battle, for practice and for tiebreakers. We chose 20 titles this year, but did a survey after the battle to see if that was too many. Results on that are varied. We will probably drop it to 15 titles to make it more manageable for next year.
We talked about doing it round robin for questions, but figured that would take too long. Then we thought about the buzzer option, but have seen at the elementary level how frustrating that can be for students who are quick vs. students who aren’t. Both might know the answer, but it’s whomever buzzes first that gets to answer. We wanted to give every team a chance to prove what they knew. Therefore we decided to go with a written test where students would mark their answers for each round when the questions were read and then we would grade them in between each round. I’m going to drop our rules below so that you don’t have to wade through paragraphs to get the information you need to start your own battle.
One librarian reads the question while the other librarian starts the timer
Question example: In which book is there a girl who likes to take up as much space as she wants in her swimming pool?
The teams have 30 seconds to answer on their paper; they get a warning at 10 seconds then pencils down when the timer goes off
Each title is assigned a letter so it’s easier to grade
There are 4 rounds of 25 questions so some books are used more than once
Students can use cards with titles on them and/or notebook paper to communicate with their teammates about what the answers are so other teams don’t overhear
Tiebreaker rounds needed if there’s a tie for 1st, 2nd or 3rd; at least 5 rounds of questions; 15 seconds for tiebreaker round; 15 questions for tiebreaker rounds so not every book will be used once
Each round lasts about 30 minutes. Librarians grade each round in between and post the current standings so teams know how they’re doing
We live streamed the event via YouTube due to lack of space in my library to host parents; we will alternate campuses every year for the competition
We provided medals to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners
All participants get a stack of books. The 1st place team got to choose from the stack that had autographed books in them from when the other librarian and I went to Librarypalooza in February to get them signed for this purpose. I also have a lot of Advanced Readers Copies (ARCs) for my vending machine that we gave away so we had enough.
Pizza and Crumbl cookies were served after the event.
We started around 9:15AM and it went until 11:30AM. It was pretty much the time we said it would go.
Our event was supposed to be held Saturday, March 13, but the chance of potential flooding in our area had us pushing it to the following Saturday, May 20. The students had a blast; we had such a great time watching them laugh and bond over books. Our district’s Education Foundation awarded us money to purchase multiple copies of next year’s titles for the 2nd Annual Meet in the Middle: Battle of the Books competition. We’ve already started asking for student suggestions on titles we could add to the new list and making our own. What questions do you still have that I didn’t answer about starting your own book battle? Drop them in the comments or DM me on any social media platform!
