After more than six years on the waiting list for the Seattle Public Library-sponsored Global Reading Challenge (GRC), Thornton Creek's time has come!

What is it? 

Each year, public elementary school 4th and 5th graders work with teacher librarians and parent volunteers to form teams. The teams read up to 10 books, selected by librarians. (Copies of the books are provided to the school libraries). After several months of preparation (November-January), the teams compete in a quiz-show style contest at their school. Winning teams advance to compete with teams from other schools across the city. The program ends with an All-City Final that takes place at the downtown Central Library.

Among the goals of the GRC are to motivate children to read, encourage reading for retention, increase teamwork and cooperative thinking skills, and have fun. 

We can have up to six teams in our inaugural year. Each team can have up to seven students (4th and 5th grade only). This is a voluntary activity and students will meet at lunch meetings once a week in November and December and more frequently in January to prepare. The questions in GRC are "point to-" type questions. That is, the answer must be found in the text (not inference questions). Teams will be built with input from teachers and students.

2 volunteers to work with groups of students, to quiz them, read the book with them and prepare them for the school tournament and beyond. These two volunteers will "manage" up to two teams (we won't know how many teams we have until we see how many kids sign up). 

10 volunteers. Each volunteer will read one of the 10 titles and prepare a two-page study guide with questions/answers and page numbers of where answers are found. These volunteers are needed primarily in January to work intensively with each team on that particular book. 

Please contact Ginny Allemann (teacher-librarian) if you have questions or would like to help make this event a great success!