On Saturday, April 23, Mrs. Chanda Lemon took 11 students to SBU in Bolivar for their Literature Bowl meet, competing against eight other teams from the surrounding schools.

Each Spring Bolivar SBU holds the Literature bowl Competition for the surrounding school districts. This is Fair Groves second year attending in the three years it has been held at the University. 

The Literature Bowl Competition is open to grades 4th through 6th. You need a team of six students minimum but you can have up to twelve students on your team however only six students can compete at one time for their team. 

At the beginning of the year Literature bowl members are given a list of ten books to read and be able to recall information on. This year’s book list consisted of  “Little Town on the Prairie” by Laura Ingalls Wilder, “Jason’s Gold” by Will Hobbs, “My Friend the Enemy” by J.B. Cheaney; “Frindle” by Andrew Clements, “How to Eat Fried Worms” by Thomas Rockwell, “Ella Enchanted” by Gail Carson Levine, “Story Thieves” by James Riley, “The War with Grandpa” by Robert Kimmel Smith, “Masterminds” by Gordon Korman, and “The Borrowers” by Mary Norton. All of these books fall in these literary categories: historical fiction, realistic fiction, fantasy and science fiction/dystopian.

After receiving the list of their books and the members having read them their practices begin; starting after Christmas break, occurring once a week on Tuesdays in the members 8th hours in the library, the Literature bowl team begin their practices. During Practice the literature bowl members are set up with a buzzer system and they are quizzed with questions over what they have read.  

In Bolivar, on the 23rd, the Fair Grove Literature Bowl sponsor, Mrs. Lemon, took 11 players to compete at SBU. All of the questions in the tournament were taken from those 10 book titles, and anything that they read was open for them to be quizzed over. 

“I appreciate the time the students took to read these novels & their enthusiasm during the game.” Shared Mrs. Lemon.

At the Competition there were a total of eight teams. Each team competed in four individual rounds of competition. Lacie Workman shared, “The team captain is the only member of the team that can play in all four rounds.” During each round, six members of each team answered individual toss-up questions, plus group bonus questions. Each round, which lasted 25 minutes or until all 20 toss-up questions had been asked, included questions from each of the 10 books. 

The Fair Grove Middle School Literature Bowl Team did not place in the top three, despite this, they shared they had a fun day at the competition.