Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Nansemond-Suffolk Academy took first place at the Suffolk Battle of the Books (BOB) final competition last month, followed by Creekside Elementary in second place. 

Suffolk’s BOB competition is run by the public libraries and aims to foster reading for enjoyment from a young age. This year’s competition saw 18 teams made up of fourth and fifth graders from six of Suffolk’s elementary schools, Nansemond-Suffolk Academy, Renaissance School of the Arts, and homeschoolers. 

This was NSA’s first year participating in the competition, and the team’s coach, Sherryl Michelle Twiford, said she was pleased with how the group performed. 

With five BOB books this year, Twiford said that all five team members read each book. However, each student also conducted their own in-depth study of two books to ensure that there was at least one expert on each book for the competition. 

“It was really interesting, I think, for the team to, kind of, explore things that maybe they don’t always have a chance to talk about in class,” Twiford said. “Kind of do that little, weird deep dive of more advanced novel studies.”

Twiford said she had never been involved in BOB or anything similar before, but because she had always enjoyed reading, she thought it sounded like fun. She was also inspired to volunteer when her daughter expressed interest in joining the team.

Creekside Elementary Media Specialist Melanie Burnor was also happy with her team’s performance in the competition despite having less time to read the books than in the past. 

All of Creekside’s BOB participants had never competed before, Burnor said, which made the students even more excited to place second.

Both teams mentioned the diverse BOB book genres and how they were able to read books they otherwise wouldn’t gravitate towards. 

“The book selection was really great because my daughter is a bit of a reader, and she was on the team, but she would not have chosen some of these genres without, you know, encouragement from the librarians,” Twiford said. “So I was really happy that she tried something new.”

The majority of the students across both teams favored “Freewater” by Amina Luqman-Dawson, which is a historical fiction novel about formerly enslaved people finding refuge in the Dismal Swamp.

The Creekside students who favored this book said it had a slow start, but the ending made it worth the read.

Overall, all five of this year’s BOB books were well-liked by the students. 

“It was cool how we all got to read these books, that we got to see different types of genres in this short period of time, there’s a whole bunch of them,” one of the Creekside students said. “Some of them … at the beginning, you’re like, this book is so boring. But then once you get, like, deep into it, you’re like, this is good.”

Both Twiford and Burnor helped their teams prepare by coming up with practice questions about the books. 

Members of both teams mentioned some of the questions were very specific, so it was important they study the whole book multiple times and pay attention to not only the larger thematic elements, but also the small details.

Another important lesson the kids took away from the competition was learning how to work as a team.

“It was teamwork,” Twiford said. “Learning to get them to write on the dry erase, you know, just the kind of mechanics of participating in a competition is another skill that they learned.”