WIRC 2018

Our teams performed so well this year, and I am so proud of how each and every student represented Norwin. As always, we had a blast at what has become my favorite school day of the year. One of our WIRC team members wrote a wonderful article about the competition for the school paper, so everything that follows is her article:

Ribbons for reading

By Madison Stanley

     On March 5, Norwin’s Westmoreland Interscholastic Reading Competition (WIRC) club attended their yearly competition at Seton Hill University.  

     WIRC students spend months reading books from a list of 30 that is released at the end of the previous year.  At this competition, teams are paired up with different teams for 4 rounds. These rounds consist of 30 questions total on any of the various books from the list. If a team misses a question the question goes to the opposing team and if that team answers correctly they are granted a quarter point. This makes the total amount of points available 18.75 per round.

     The Norwin WIRC club met during lunches with more frequent meetings as the competition grew closer. During these meetings the group would discuss books from the list with the intention of giving the entire club a better understanding of all the books on the list. Every student was required to read four books and write question sets on each, which is the only requirement of joining the club.

     Norwin had three teams attend the competition this year. The teams based their names off of books from the WIRC list. The freshman team was Extremely Quiet and Incredibly Nerdy, which is a pun on the book Extremely Quiet and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. The sophomore team was Code Name Norwin, based off of Code Name Verity by Elizabeth E. Wein.  The senior team, including one junior, was Booking for Alaska, based off of John Green’s Looking for Alaska.

     Extremely Quiet and Incredibly Close placed third overall and awarded yellow ribbons, the highest finish for any Norwin team ever in WIRC competitions.  Booking for Alaska placed fifth overall, which was awarded with pink ribbons.

     “This year’s questions must have been a lot harder than last year’s,” said senior Sebastian Pratt, due to the fact Booking for Alaska had a lower score than the Norwin team which placed sixth in the previous year. 

     Overall, Norwin’s WIRC teams have been improving and expanding over the years and will hopefully continue to do so.

     “We did better than I thought we did,” said senior and Booking for Alaska team captain, Meghan Williamson.

    The Norwin WIRC team hopes to continue improvement next year and awaits the next list of books to dive into.

Our First Author Visit!

We were very lucky this past April to invite YA author Jessica Warman to visit our school library. I had written a small grant earlier in the school year that included a request for funds so that we could enjoy an author visit, which we had never experienced before. Luckily, one of our awesome Knight Readers had a connection to YA author Jessica Warman, whose book Between was on our reading competition list! After just a couple of emails back and forth, Jessica came to our library for a visit! She requested an interview format, so I prepared a few questions after reading her book The Last Good Day of the Year and after reading several articles and online interviews with the author. As a true crime podcast fan myself, her most recent book, a bit of a mystery thriller, appealed to me. In an effort to keep the group small and engaged, I invited members of the reading team, our student-run book club, students who had checked out Warman's books from our school library, and finally anyone who expressed an excitement about the author visit. Students had permission to miss about an hour of class, as I didn't want lack of a ride home to inhibit students from participating in this experience. Ms. Warman was just absolutely lovely during our interview, and then she very graciously answered a number of student questions about her books, about being an author, and finally about living in Pittsburgh. She revealed that one book had been optioned for a movie, so we will continue to look forward to that! After expressing that the time had flown by quickly during our visit, Jessica offered to send autographed bookmarks for all students who attended. Sure enough, a couple of weeks later I was able to surprise our students with a souvenir from our first author visit! I decided to hide the extra bookmarks inside of all four books we have in the library authored by Warman with a little note stating that the bookmark is a gift for the reader. Our students (and I!) very much enjoyed this visit, and we cannot thank Jessica enough for making the trip out to our school library!

Perseverance in the Library

At the beginning of November, I received the call that I have feared every year since I started my school library career: as of that moment, library funding was completely cut. To be fair, all "non-emergency" funding was cut in the entire district. According to the new algorithm for determining federal funding, my district would be receiving significantly less than expected. This "moratorium on spending" of course trickled down to each professional in each building. In some ways, I was fortunate that I got the call in November instead of July because I had already purchased a few staples like our online databases and our reading team books. But I was expecting to spend approximately 70% of the library budget sometime before February, which is our usual yearly spending cutoff date. I took a little bit of time beating myself up for not focusing more on purchasing at the beginning of the school year, but there was no point in brooding over something that I had no control over. Instead, I listed my major goals for the year to determine exactly what I needed in order to continue having a successful year for the library. The first goal was to purchase a list of 50 books that were primarily student recommendations. Contrary to popular opinion, fiction reading in my school library has increased this year, and I am absolutely determined to continue this trend. Secondly, a student last year took the initiative to start a student-run book club during lunches after the reading competition concluded in the Spring. They had selected two books, and we would need at least 25 copies of each. Finally, we need funds to attend our annual field trip to the county reading competition. I needed a plan.

First, I recalled our local Barnes and Noble store contacting me in the past about facilitating an in-store book fair. I contacted them again, and set up a meeting with the manager to discuss all of the details and to set up the date. We chose a date approximately two weeks before Christmas, which proved to be an effective time to have the fair. We advertised in school, on social media, and to parents and community members. We also brought copies of our donation code with us in case people in the store asked us who we were (we were all wearing our school colors or our reading team t-shirts). With a combination of luck and hard work, we earned over $1,600 in books for our library. I am incredibly thankful to Barnes and Noble for helping us to fill our library with new books, and I feel so lucky to work with such wonderful and motivated students. We had students who offered to stay at Barnes and Noble all day to give our donation code to parents and community members who asked for it, although we had such a great volunteer response that we only needed students to stay for 1-2 hour shifts. It was such a great, uplifting day!

Secondly, to ensure that we had enough funds to purchase books for our student-run book club and to possibly go on a field trip, I wrote several grants. For one grant, I was interviewed at the YALSA Symposium in Pittsburgh. My grant proposal was unfortunately not accepted, although the process was a positive one. For this grant, we were required to be able to speak on how individual conference sessions inspired our grant idea and how we might use what we learned in order to improve our home library. Although my grant idea was not selected, I am still hoping to be able to gain funds at some point to make my idea a reality.

Finally, Wal-Mart came through and granted us $750 to run our student book club this year! I am extremely thankful to our local Wal-Mart store for selecting our proposal. I recommend that other school libraries in need consider looking into grants offered by large and small organizations alike. Many companies are happy to support public education, and this librarian is incredibly thankful to them.

Knight Readers - WIRC 2016

Knight Readers Excel at the Westmoreland Interscholastic Reading Competition

Norwin High School students participated in the Westmoreland Interscholastic Reading Competition (WIRC) on February 29, 2016 at Seton Hill University. Two Norwin High School teams, A Midsummer Knight’s Read and Knights of the Round Table, competed against teams from around the region in the grades 9-12 division. In preparation for this annual event, our Knight Readers collectively read fiction and non-fiction texts off of a list of 30 total books. Students discussed these books during lunch meetings and created practice questions to quiz one another on the content of the stories. Students competed against other schools at the event to answer trivia-type questions about the plot and characters of the books they read throughout the year. Both teams faired very well, winning three out of four rounds of competition. A Midsummer Knight’s Read placed 9^th this year and Knights of the Round Table placed 5^th. This is the first year that both of our teams placed in the top ten and were recognized during the closing ceremony! We are so excited to celebrate the successes of our teams this year. Students in grades 9-12 for the 2016-2017 school year who are interested in joining the Knight Readers should contact Ms. Kauffman in the Norwin High School Library.

Knights of the Round Table Row 1: Cecilia Koncerak, Rachel Garcia, Sam Naponic (team captain), Natalie Naponic, Yuhan Lu, Hanna Rhoads, Row 2: Hannah Nestlerode, Catherine Balaban, Cole Dempsey, Marina Novotnak, Sebastian Pratt

A Midsummer Knight’s Read Row 1: Dom Orsino, Anna Swets, Emily Dahlstrom, Kelly Tran, Ashley Divins (team captain), Aimee McGillis, Row 2: Tynan Tinley, Erin Crust, Bella Reiter, Julia Szlis, Madalyn Durmis

Knight Readers Book-It to the Top of Westmoreland Interscholastic Reading Competition

*The following article was written by K. Kaufman and will appear in the Knight Vision newsletter

Norwin High School students participated in the Westmoreland Interscholastic Reading Competition (WIRC) on March 9, 2015 at Seton Hill University. Along with the two Norwin High School teams, Once Upon a Knight and The Knights Who Say Read!, forty other teams from around the state competed this year in the grades 9-12 division. In preparation for this annual event, our Knight Readers collectively read fiction and non-fiction texts off of a list of 30 total books. Students discussed these books during WIRC meetings and created practice questions to quiz one another on the content of the stories. Students competed against other schools at the event to answer trivia-type questions about the plot and characters of the books they read throughout the year. We are very proud of both of our teams! The Knights Who Say Read! won one round of competition, and Once Upon a Knight won four rounds of competition, placing them sixth amongst the forty-two total teams! We are so excited to celebrate the successes of our teams this year. Students in grades 9-12 for the 2015-2016 school year who are interested in joining the Knight Readers should contact Ms. Kauffman in the Norwin High School Library.