Dunrae Gardens crowned champion at EMSB鈥檚 first Junior Battle of the Books
October 5, 2022
In-Person Open House
Elementary school teams from Gardenview in St. Laurent, Pierre de Coubertin in St. Leonard, Dunrae Gardens in TMR and host Roslyn in Westmount competed at the Battle of Books (BOTB) Competition on May 19 – the first time the EMSB has held a Battle of the Books Junior Event. Congratulations to Dunrae Gardens for achieving the top score! Battle of the Books is a reading challenge and trivia competition for motivated students who are avid readers. During the 2022-2023 academic year, participants read and discussed 10 books carefully selected by a former member of EMSB’s Gifted and Exceptional Learners team, Jenna Mlynaryk, now librarian at Westmount and Lester B. Pearson high schools. The program ran from November and culminated in May in a two-hour trivia competition between the four top-scoring schools. During the school year, participants met weekly for one hour under the guidance of Dr. Camelia Birlean, consultant, Gifted and Exceptional Learners at the EMSB, and Pamela Anang, a member of the enrichment team, to discuss the books through literature circles in which students explored and openly discussed the various elements of the books. Precompetition activities took place, including an in-house tournament. Students also worked collaboratively and independently to generate and refine trivia questions, which were then evaluated by the mentors. Highquality questions were chosen along with those created by the mentors to form the pool of questions that were asked in the final competition. Dr. Birlean explained the reason behind getting students to create the questions was to engage them meaningfully with the content of the books while shaping their inquisitive mind, “We don’t want our students to be simply consumers of information, but creators of information,” she said. Training for the competition involves practicing the format and timing of the questioning.
Finals at Roslyn
During the competition at Roslyn, Ms. Anang asked the teams questions during two sessions of two rounds each. In Round One, competitors had two minutes to answer each of the four paragraph-based questions. In a fast-paced and exciting Round Two, called the lightning round, competitors needed to answer as many questions as they could within two minutes. Accompanying Dr. Birlean at the judges’ table were Dunrae Gardens Principal Despina Michakis and Roslyn Principal Joanna Genovezos and Vice Principal Mireille Tehbelian. Most participants read more than half the books, which range from 100 to over 300 pages. The event was well attended with a parent/guardian and student audience of about 50 people, who gathered in the Roslyn gymnasium festively decorated for the event.
