Student Stories: Sixth Grade Teamwork Leads to Trivia Night Success
February 23, 2016 by
Trivia Night is a fundraiser organized by the Sixth Grade students and teachers each year in order to pay for their trip to New York in the spring. On this trip, the students (with teacher chaperones) go to a Broadway play, a baseball game, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and other places in the city. Trivia Night made about half of the money needed for trip this year.
At Trivia Night, parents and guests participate in ten rounds with ten trivia questions each, and each round has a different category. This year’s categories were Washington DC, Sports, Literary Characters, Pop Culture, What to Expect when you’re Expecting, Are You Smarter than a Sixth Grader, Star Wars, Kings and Prophets of Israel, Current Events, and Oscars Losers. Among the questions asked were “Who was Elijah the Prophet’s successor?”* and “In Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones, whose DNA was used to make the clone army?”^ One of our favorite rounds is “Are You Smarter than a Sixth Grader.” In this round, participants answer questions written by the Sixth Graders. The questions are all based on what the Sixth Graders have been learning in Language Arts, Social Studies, and Math. For this round, teams can bid to get an advantage; the highest bidding table earns the help of a volunteer sixth grade expert (chosen from a hat).
Students were assigned one of three jobs for the big night: judges, wait staff, or kitchen staff. On the afternoon before Trivia Night, students prepared platters of food to be sold at the event, wrote questions, and prepared envelopes with rules and score sheets. At the event, wait staff served food and collected answer sheets, and judges input all the answers on a spreadsheet and gave the final tallies, which determined the night’s winning tables, to the teachers. It was very intense, and took all of us working together to make it work. Sixth graders thought that Trivia Night was a fun and cool experience.
*Answer: Elisha
^Answer: Jango Fett