One of my VERY favorite things AND one of the things I’m MOST asked about is Battle of the Books. This is a program hosted by the NC School Library Media Association (NCSLMA) for elementary, middle AND high school in which students read books off a set list of novels and compete with other schools in trivia questions about the books. I’ve been helping with our team for at least ten years and have been the official second coach for the last several years. In most cases, the school media coordinator must be a member of NCSLMA and agree to be one of the coaches for a school to compete. To see if your school is eligible, click here. For more info, visit NCSLMA's website here and click "How We Promote."
Elementary Battle of the Books consists of 16 titles that are released each spring for competition the following winter/spring. (Click here for the 2025-2026 official list or click here for a visually appealing version I created.) Students are expected to read at least a few of the books (ideally around five). We start promoting the books as soon as the list comes out in spring and encourage the students to start reading over the summer. I chose to write this blog post today because over half of the titles (shown below) are on a “buy 3 for the price of 2” sale on Amazon right now for Prime days! Click each book (affiliate links) to go to its Amazon listing. I loaded up my cart this morning. I highly encourage teachers and parents involved with students who compete to read the books as well. They are always high quality literature with many important themes and interesting talking points.
*Swim Team is the first graphic novel ever on EBOB!
Questions will cover both the text and the illustrations.
In a Battle of the Books competition, students are asked questions like, “In which book does _____ happen?” or “In which books does a character say?” Many of the questions include quotations from the text but they never include place or character names. There are 12 questions in a round a title cannot be repeated in a round, so four titles are left out each round. There can be 12 members on a team, but only six compete at once and they may huddle up and help each other on each question. Teams have 20 seconds to answer the question and receive two points for the title and one additional point for the author’s name. If a team misses a question, the opposing team has ten seconds to try to score a rebound (stolen) point. To get an idea of the types of questions that are asked, click the images below for questions I’ve written for a couple of short novels.
Competition at the district level is very serious, and students are expected to stay completely quiet, take turns as directed and limit their facial expression and reactions. Also, the timer is not visible, so learning to sense twenty and ten second timeframes is an important skill. Even for the books they don’t read, students try to familiarize themselves with genre, plot, main characters, setting, etc. to help with educated guesses.
Battle of the Books is open to fourth and fifth grade students. Our media coordinator starts practices in September on Friday mornings before school starts. Students discuss the books, write their own practice questions, and practice titles and author names at first. By November, I start having additional practices (usually for half an hour after school), in which we compete in practice battles and read the first chapter of all the books at some point or another to get a sense for the writing style. Click here to make a copy of this spreadsheet I use to keep up with how many students have read each book.
Before winter break, we name our official team of twelve members, based on
participation in practices and proficiency on Google quizzes we give for each book. We adapt these quizzes from an amazing resource we purchase each year on Teachers Pay Teachers that can be found here. It includes more practice battle questions than you could ever use, true/false, fill-in-the-blank and multiple choice quizzes, as well as other tools such as a large document of similar themes and ideas in each book, title/author flashcards, and a bookmark to track reading progress. I credit much of our team’s successes to this TPT author and her materials!
Our district holds three different days of competition at the elementary level with eight or nine schools competing on each of these preliminary days. Battle of the Books format requires that each team face each other team, so on an eight-school day, you’d compete in seven battles. The battles generally take 10-15 minutes each. For our district, the top three teams from each preliminary day then compete against each other on a final competition day. That team represents the district at the regional level.
The best we’ve placed with me as a coach is third in the district, and it is one of my favorite memories. When our team made the cut for finals, we realized that the fifth graders would be on their grade level field trip the day of competition, leaving us with seven fourth graders to compete the whole day. They were nervous but they rallied together and took third place in a tie breaker round. It was so fun to watch their confidence grow in an uncomfortable situation! Many of the students I’ve seen thrive in Battle of the Books don’t necessarily compete in sports, so it’s a valuable experience for them to be part of a team.
One last note: I do have a Novel Unit for one of this year's books: Front Desk by Kelly Yang. It's an amazing book that changed my perspective in important ways, as many of these books do. Click here or the image below to see more.
Battle of the Books is a great program whether you are looking to start a team, encourage your child to join a team, or just seeking quality middle grades fiction. Let me know if you have questions or want to discuss further!
