Kids' Lit Quiz National Final

By Mrs Gemma Wilson, Teacher Librarian

Kids' Lit Quiz is a national books and literature competition, which has been running for 12 years. Radford has been competing for six years and excitingly won the Canberra heat two weeks ago.

In 2023, more than 140 schools participated, with about 313 teams from these schools. There are 15 heats across Australia, so to make it into the final means being in the top 15 schools across Australia.

On Monday, 5 June, Owen Henderson, Lucinda Harrison, Thenuki Weerabaddana Dissanayake and Xander Barber, from Years 7 and 8, had an early morning start to get to Sydney. The final was held in the beautiful rooms of the State Library of NSW, with buzzers used to answer. With no opportunities for discussion between the team, the pressure was high as an incorrect answer also meant the loss of a point. This was definitely a step above the pencil and paper version we used at the Canberra heats.

The five rounds of topics included authors, anthropomorphised characters, non-fiction, book titles, and fictional lifeforms. This last one was extremely hard: the range of answers included characters such as yetis, trolls, alicorns, The Abominable Snowman, genies and Big Foot!

Our students were very knowledgeable across all the genres of reading. We are very proud of the strong reading culture we have developed here at Radford.

Radford finished in a very impressive fourth place. As our first experience at the national level, we learnt so much and were amazed at how fast some students answer. We are certainly ambitious about the future and look forward to many more hours of reading!