Six Greene County Middle School students have qualified for a state competition that is based on reading. 

Middle School Librarian Jennifer Powers says the sixth graders are traveling to Ames this coming Tuesday for the Grand Battle in the Battle of the Books. She tells Raccoon Valley Radio their team had to read 15 selected books from the Iowa Teen Award list and they were tested, with multiple choice questions. 

Powers points out that the team tied with 12 other schools for the last four remaining spots to qualify for the state contest. She notes that the tiebreaker was a series of “in which book” type questions, that the students had to correctly name the book and spell the titles of each. Samantha Pedersen is one of the students that qualified and she talks about the life skills that she’s gained by being a part of this group.

“I would say teamwork and equally portioning stuff because you don’t want to leave anybody out, but you don’t want to give all of the books to one person (to read). Also, so you have to talk with your team and you have to learn all of the names of the things. You need to be able to communicate with your team too, like if you don’t like this book and you want to pass it to somebody else, you have to tell them, you’re not just going to be like, ‘I’m just not going to read it anymore.’”       

One of the other students, Eli Dearborn, describes the inspiration behind their team name the “Council of the Cheesemon” came from last year’s team.

“It was the ‘Cheese Wizards.’ So we wanted to go with a cheese theme to honor their legacy. We thought of ‘Council’ because we’re like a group and we tried to be serious for the first few days, like a council. And then the ‘Cheesemon’ I thought of Pokemon, and then cheese, and I thought of cheese Pikachu. And that’s what inspired the idea.”

Powers says last year, the team that also qualified from Greene County Middle School included Aidan Deal, Eli Hardaway and Teagan Warnke. She notes that while they did well at the Grand Battle, they did not make it to the final round. She hopes everyone does well to work towards the “best of the rest” title. The students that are joining Pedersen and Dearborn are Franklin Bauer, Cooper Meythaler, Ethan Daniel and Alyvia Robison. You can listen to more from Pedersen, Dearborn and Daniel from yesterday’s Let’s Talk Greene County program by clicking here.