Since March, five Year 9 students have been busy studying in preparation for this year’s Reader’s Cup competition. This is an annual event where teams of Year 9 students from schools around the country answer sets of questions about a set of six prescribed novels.

Last Wednesday, our Year 9 team competed at Rangitoto College for the North Shore regional competition. The team was (from left to right) Maya Timlin, Romy Lee, Meila Oosterdijk, Gigi Albrecht and Yu Na Lim.

It was a tough competition but our team led for all six rounds and managed to hold on for the win! This means that Carmel is now the first school in the North Shore competition to not only have won 3 times, but 3 times in a row! This makes us the most successful school in the history of the North Shore competition. Even the event organisers commented that “They must be doing something right at Carmel College”.

The competition was a great way to get us to expand our reading horizons and to dive deeper into New Zealand’s history and culture, as well as other countries too. 

We will now prepare for the Nationals at the end of Term 3 where we’ll compete against the other regional winning teams from all over New Zealand. This will mean a whole new set of books to study but we look forward to the challenge! We’ve grown together as a team over the course of the past term or so, and we can’t wait to keep going, hopefully taking Carmel all the way to the win!

Thank you to Mrs Taylor for her support and for forming the team in the first place, as well as to last year’s champions who mentored us and prepared us for what it would be like in the real competition. We could never have done this without all of you. Another thank you to the parents who helped us at home and the teachers who put in their effort at school.

Meila Oosterdijk & Maya Timlin, Year 9