That’s not an audience for a concert, or a sports event, or a play – hundreds of people filled the seats at the Central Library downtown last night to watch students answer questions about books! With Roxhill Elementary, Sanislo Elementary, and Concord International teams among the 10 finalists in the citywide Global Reading Challenge, we had to go downtown last night to see what happened. Though none of the three – the Concord Orange Dragons, Roxhill Bulldogs and Sanislo Ice Dodos – scored high enough to be one of the two teams advancing to a championship match against Canadian teams (Bryant and Thurgood Marshall teams will do that, via video conference) with north-of-the-border teams, they all performed well. Concord’s team is at left in the next photo, with the Roxhill team at right (Sanislo was in the middle of the floor, out of our range):

Competing teams sat at tables on the auditorium floor and wrote down answers to multiple-choice questions about the books they had read for this year’s challenge (here’s the list of books), which in the beginning involved dozens of schools around the city; then finally after almost two hours, the scores were tallied, winners announced, cookies were enjoyed. (And hopefully, even without a “challenge” to live up to, more books!)