On Wednesday, 4th November, myself and TLA ,Lisa Lavery, accompanied our team of four young hopefuls from Aquinas to Wellington College to compete against nineteen other  schools in the Northern Ireland Heat of The Kids Lit Quiz.  

KLQ is an exciting Inter Schools Challenge on books and reading and is the brainchild of Wayne Mills, reading enthusiast and university lecturer from New Zealand.  It has been going since 1991 and attracts entries from as far afield as New Zealand, China, S. Africa, USA  and the UK (including N I) with the final to be held this year in New Zealand in July 2016 .Wayne decides the categories and comes up with 100 questions for each heat – no mean feat particularly when you consider the wide ranging and diverse categories he comes up with.

We chose our team (and three reserves) by staging a qualifying round in the library. The highest scorers got onto the team and next highest were allowed to come as spectators. Along with the nineteen other excited  teams from schools all over Northern Ireland, our team was presented with ten rounds of ten questions on literature and reading with categories ranging from “Mythical Beings” to “Accidents” to ”Vegetables” and other equally unlikely topics.  Spot prizes, team prizes and prizes for book character costumes abounded and everyone thoroughly enjoyed themselves.

In a very hard fought contest, the Aquinas team worked themselves up from 4th place to 3rd place and then in the final round to 2nd place overall. Sullivan Upper piped us to the post with 4 points more and in turn we beat Friends School Lisburn into third place. The overall winners  go through to the UK final on 4th December in Oxford   We are routing for them to get through to represent Northern Ireland  in the Final in New Zealand. In August 2016.