Year 10 Reading Challenge 2021

By Esther Kristel | Posted: Wednesday November 3, 2021

She reads books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live. Annie Dillard, The Living

The Year 10 Reading Challenge is an event that we take a lot of joy from in the English Department. It feeds off the Year 9 Challenge, run by Mrs Summerfield as part of the Year 9 Library Programme, and it connects seamlessly into the NCEA Level 1 Independent Reading internal standard that our Year 10 students begin with their first reading response taster.

We enjoy the sharing of books, suggestions, and ‘must-reads’ that get passed around, and the recommendations from teacher to student and student to teacher! Our library keeps stocked with a continuing flow of new titles, so between Classics yet to read and contemporary new authors just on the scene, there is a lot for everyone to choose from.

Some of the texts students read during this challenge include: Out Now, edited by Sandra Mitchell; Boy, by Roald Dahl; Down Under, by Bill Bryson; Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley; Emma, by Jane Austen; Go Get a Watchman, by Harper Lee; The Tell Tale Heart, by Edgar Allan Poe; Becoming Michelle Obama, by Michelle Obama; Flight Path, by David Hill; More Than This, by Patrick Ness; Sybill, by Flora Rheta Schriber; Savage Spider, by Nick Arnold; One Piece, by Oda Eiichiro; Phylogenetic Context for the Origins of Feathers, by Stuart Sumida and Christopher Broche; I Have Lost My Way, by Gayle Forman; This Winter, By Alice Osman; The Last of the Sky Pirates, by Paul Stewart and Chris Ridell; and The Girls I’ve Been, by Tess Sharpe.

We are deeply grateful to the Gaffney family, who continue to support and encourage the reading culture at LPHS, and donate generously each year. We share their love for reading and the voice that grows ever louder that tells us what an important love, skill, culture, revelation it is to hold onto and grow.

Congratulations to all the Year 10 Reading Challengers and to all readers everywhere - what a gift!

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]

― Carl Sagan,Cosmos

The Year 10 Reading Challenge Place-Getters

10A

Improved Reading Ability - Kasem Zarzar

Improved Reading Ability - Abdallah Alashour

Greatest Effort - Eliza Hennephof

Great Effort - Belle Hohaia

10S

Most Texts Read - Quinn Wilson

Classic Choice - James McMillan

Reading Bingo - Charles Ross

Reading Goal Met - Oscar Kennedy

Range of Texts - Brie Abernethy

Special Mention - Sophia Goodin, Jula-May Taylor, David Zeng

10B

Best Reading Response - Ally May Sharma

Most Texts Read - Kai Sweeney

Classic Choice - Oscar Lambeth

Range of Texts - Fen McIntosh

Reading Goal Met - Hannah Barton

10X

Best Reading Response - Ruby-Louise Grant

Most Challenging Read - Arlo Bickerstaff

Best Non Fiction Choice - Tamsin Norrish

Most Varied Genre Choice - Ava Agatsiotis

Commended Effort - Smith Walker-Greaves

10U

Classics and Variety Prize -Maia Jack

Tolkien Appreciation Prize - Louis Robertson

Critical Awareness and Maturity of comments - Hannah Hogan

Numerical Superiority - Nathan Mutch

Exuberant Comments and Range - Grace Fagerlund

Highly Commended - Lauren Davey and Abi Gibson

10K

First Place - Chris Hunt

Second Place - Mathew Simpson

Third Place - Quinn Byers

Best Reading Response - Erin Byas

Best Comments - Anna Trendall

Highly Commended - Dakoda Tinirau-Connolly