National Reading Champions Quiz

On Tuesday 28 February an amazing team of four Year 7 students, Leyla C, Nancy Q, Flora S-H, and Georgia McS took their seats for this year’s National Reading Champions Quiz.  

The quiz, run by The National Literacy Trust, brings teams together from schools across the UK to compete in online regional heats for the chance to represent their area in the live grand finals. The quiz is tough. There are seventy-five questions over eight rounds, each with a different theme which this year included ‘relatives in fiction’ cue panicked faces all round. 

How do you prepare for such a quiz? You need to be an avid reader and have a team with different reading tastes that represent a wide range of genres. Wimbledon High School had just that and our students did brilliantly, so well that by the end they were joint first place with two other teams, whittled down from the twenty-one who started.  

This led to a tie-break situation and after three very tense rounds, during which my nerves were shredded, it came down to one final random question and it was very random. How many words are there in The Very Hungry Caterpillar? The nearest answer would win, and teams were told it had thirty-two pages. After some very quick calculations the team guessed 192 words. It was a quiz winning answer and now our students are through to the finals in June, representing WHS and South West London.  

I am so proud of the team; this result is a testament to their love of reading and ability to recall the finer details of even the most minor of plot lines and characters. Well done girls and good luck in the final! 

And how many words are there in The Very Hungry Caterpillar? 224.  

Ms Sharp, Senior School Librarian