Northern Primary Readers' Cup - Celebrating Readers

Schools in and around Launceston have been participating in readers’ cup challenges since 2002. Anne Donnelly shares the highlights and tensions of the recent primary school competition, with the secondary event scheduled for September.

By 4pm, on the 26^th June, Summerdale Primary was buzzing with excitement and tension as fourteen schools from around Northern Tasmania gathered for the 17^th year of competition in the Inter-school Readers’ Cup. It’s a highly successful competition thanks to the hard work of staff at all the participating schools.

The event began with the Extra Challenge, set by Nella Pickup. This year’s book was Ada’s Violin by Susan Hood. The groups had ten minutes to write down the character traits that helped Ava to overcome her challenges and reach her goals. It’s an impromptu challenge which the students and teachers only find out when the judge presents the challenge, although the winning teams read the book beforehand.

After the added excitement of a reporter and photographer (Examiner article), the quiz commences. The students had spent several weeks reading a total of 6 books in preparation for this challenging segment of the event. As always, the quiz questions proved tricky for some but Glen Dhu scored well with 43.5 and Summerdale did a great job, scoring 48 from a possible 54! The books were:

The Legend of Spud Murphy / Eoin Colfer                                              

Parvana / Deborah Ellis                                                         

Help Around the House / Morris Gleitzman

The Last Elephant / Justin D’Ath                                         

Storm Boy / Colin Thiele

Meet Banjo Paterson/ Kristin Weidenbach

There was a short break in the library where students had a light meal which was provided by Kings Meadows High School before we all met in the Community Hall. Parents arrived from 6pm and Nella talked about the work on Ada’s Violin, where four schools, Scotch Oakburn, Glen Dhu, Riverside and Perth had excellent scores of 9.

To a packed house of parents, grandparents, friends and school communities we started the Creative Presentations. It’s always amazing to see the variety and depth of responses that are displayed by the groups when they are given the opportunity to reflect on the issues and emotions of the books that they have been reading. There were a large number of plays but we were also entertained by debates, dance and movies. Parvana and The Legend of Spud Murphy were popular choices for Creative Responses but it was great to see East Launceston recount the life of Banjo Paterson in their performance.

Not surprisingly, Nella and her fellow judges, Patrick Fleming and Marissa King, had a difficult task. Three schools, East Launceston, Invermay and Riverside had perfect scores of 18. After the scores for all three sections were tallied, East Launceston was third, Glen Dhu second and the winners of the perpetual trophy were Summerdale Primary.

This year we were lucky enough to be able to present all the teams with shortlisted books thanks to the generosity of the CBCA Tasmania.

Here are the winners!

Summerdale Primary School Readers' Cup team.

Anne Donnelly
Northern Primary Reader’s Cup Coordinator

The Northern Primary Readers’ Cup has been supported by CBCA Tasmania and the Education Department through the Federal partnership grant. Books and prizes from the Short List & Notable Book Week titles were provided to participating schools.