On Tuesday our team of Meg O’Connor, Finn Cattaway, Will Butler and Oscar Te Morenga-Wakelin flew to Wellington with Mr Jenkinson to compete in the Kid’s Literacy Quiz national finals. 

We had to get up early enough to be at school by quarter to six! When we got to school we got in the car, drove to the airport then flew out to Wellington. Once there we caught the bus into town then walked to the Beehive and Parliament. We took a tour of the old houses of parliament, then went to look at the Beehive. We met Clare Curran and she told us how she got kicked out of parliament one day for wearing an Otago jersey!

We walked to the National Library which was conveniently just across the street and ate our lunch and about 400% of our DRI of sugar and headed into the theatre where the competition was being held.

We got to try out using the buzzers and then we started. We got a few questions early on but then it moved into harder things like first lines of books and sidekicks, and we didn’t get as many. You scored 2 points for a right answer but lost 1 for a wrong answer.

There were 15 teams and 65 questions. We ended up fifth with 14 points and the top South Island school. The winning team was Southwell Intermediate from Hamilton which left Oscar blaming it all on the voters, saying that if the Civilian Party had won then we would only be 4th because the Civilian Party promised national independance from Hamilton.

We all got free books for taking part in the competition. Then we went to Te Papa and looked at the Gallipoli exhibition “The Scale of Our War” then we all got hungry so we had Subway and chocolate for tea before flying back to Dunedin and collapsing exhausted into our beds.

By Will Butler