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Cliff Drive Elementary team victorious at Reading Link Challenge

An epic morning of reading and competition ended with an epic win for Tsawwassen’s Cliff Drive Elementary.
reading challenge
Eighteen Delta elementary schools battled it out question for question Thursday at South Park Elementary in the finals of the Reading Link Challenge.

An epic morning of reading and competition ended with an epic win for Tsawwassen’s Cliff Drive Elementary.

The Epic Winners team consisting of Mary Neufeld, Noella Yang, Sophia Barber, Eileen Cia, Ella Li and Talan Taylor-Hunt bested 17 other Delta schools to win this year’s Delta-wide Reading Link Challenge finals at South Park Elementary Thursday.

The team will now represent Delta at the Fraser Valley Community Challenge to be held Wednesday, April 25 at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

The final morning of competition brought together 108 students in grades 4 and 5 from all 18 Delta elementary schools. Each school held its own competition to determine a team of six to send to the finals.

Reading Link Challenge is a province-wide program for students that promotes the “sport” of reading. The program is run as a series of quiz/trivia challenges with winning teams advancing to higher levels of competition.

Participants read six books and met to discuss each one, memorizing key facts and details.

At the finals, judges posed a series of questions based on the chosen books, which this year included Masterpiece, The Mask That Sang, Fish in a Tree, After Peaches, The Incredible Twisting Arm and Erupts.

The objectives of the competition are to introduce children to a wide variety of literature, to encourage children to participate in a group activity that requires teamwork and healthy competition, and to encourage children to read for retention.

The Reading Link Challenge has a storied history among school districts around North America.

In the late 1930s, the Battle of the Books was a weekly radio show that used a quiz format to test children’s knowledge of good literature.
The Battle of the Booksprogram moved to a library setting in 1993 at Kalamazoo (Michigan) Public Library. It was used to encourage grade 4 and 5 students to have fun with reading. In 1996, a similar project was undertaken at Seattle Public Library.

In 2002, Coquitlam and Port Coquitlam libraries joined the challenge, and in 2004 the entire Fraser Valley Regional Library (FVRL) came on board.