Peters Township students show that ‘books really matter’
Fourth-graders Sophia Messerly, left, and Juliana Taylor show some of the works they’ve read for the Battle of the Books.
Showing off their team T-shirts are, from left, Lydia Ruth, Grace Belcher, Olivia Montgomery, Sabrina Coleman and Allison Bentz.
Alana Vazquez enjoyed reading Robert O’Brien’s “Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIHM.”
Marlowe Grandelis colors a team T-shirt.
Instead of actually reading, today’s youngsters prefer just to watch videos on various electronic devices. Right?
“In this technological world,” Meg Owens said, “I think that we forget how much books truly matter to kids.”
As McMurray Elementary School’s librarian, she often sees the evidence.
“I have a lot of kids who go to a Kindle, especially the sixth-graders,” she acknowledged. “But my big readers come in for books daily. They like that book.”
Many of the fourth-graders have had their liking of books kindled – hey, who could resist that one? – by the Peters Township school’s first-ever Battle of the Books.
“The genesis of this is that every March, we do a reading promotion with a different theme,” Owens explained. “This is kind of like our big culminating activity, something we’ve wanted to do for a while. So if it’s successful, we’re going to hopefully open it up to the fifth grade next year.”
To prepare for the March 31 quiz show-type event, students formed 14 teams, divvying up the reading assignments for a dozen faculty-selected books.
“They’re all different genres, everything from sci-fi to mystery to classics,” Owens said: from James Patterson’s “House of Robots” to Robert O’Brien’s “Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIHM,” and everything in between.
“From a parent’s standpoint, I love that this is the first time that it pushed my daughter outside the genre that she likes,” Shelly Belcher, school district communications coordinator and mother of fourth-grader Grace, said. “They ended up being books she loved, that she couldn’t put down.”
Ten-year-old Alana Vazquez reported a similar experience.
“I like to read comic-ish, really sci-fi kind of books,” she said. But completing the likes of Dan Gutman’s basketball-oriented “Million Dollar Shot” and Grace Lin’s culturally diverse “The Year of the Dog” has opened her eyes to some other possibilities.
Hillary Grandelis – her daughter, Marlowe, is on the Beauties and the Bookworms team – also complimented the variety.
“It’s been such a nice thing that sort of gives them the opportunity to see what else is out there,” she said. “And I think they’ve all really enjoyed the books. I’ve actually enjoyed the books. I tried to read as many as I could, just so I could help them with questions.”
Forming teams of students to give answers about the contents of the books they read provided the added bonus of teaching them about cooperation.
“We had a group of girls who weren’t really friends, who had to learn how to work together,” Tami Coleman said, daughter Sabrina being one of the members of Beauties and the Books (no “worms” there). “We’ve blended together, and it’s been awesome. They get along great.”
Collaborating with McMurray Elementary to help the students be able to check out the books they wanted to read were Peters Township Public Library and other school district libraries.
The degree of participation among the fourth-graders impressed Blair Stoehr, McMurray’s principal.
“There are so many things, as far as entertainment goes, that are vying for our children’s time,” he said. “So anything we can do to encourage and inspire our children to be reading, for enjoyment and entertainment, is something we really support.”
Regarding whether she’ll continue to do so, young Alana offered an enthusiastic affirmative.
“Who wouldn’t?”