Elliot

From today’s Midland Daily News:

This afternoon Boomslang participated in the championship battle for the 2011-2012 Battle of the Books.  They faced “The Cryptid Chickens” from Blessed Sacrament.  Each team was asked 15 questions during the battle.  The Chickens answered all 15 of theirs correctly and 3 out of the 4 that Boomslang missed.  The Chickens were pretty much unbeatable.  I’m sure the kids from Boomslang were a little disappointed about the outcome, but mostly they just seemed to be glad to have permission to read non-Battle-books again.  Congratulations to the Chickens and to Boomslang and Coach Herman for a fantastic performance in this year’s Battle!

Saturday afternoon Elliot and his pals participated in the oral round of Battle of the Books.  The fact that they had made it to the oral round meant that they were already in the top 16 out of the ~ 64 teams that participated this year.  Eight teams had already competed in the morning round to determine the first team that will participate in the championship round (The Cryptid Chickens from Blessed Sacrament).  Elliot’s team (Boomslang) was competing against seven other teams (5 from Woodcrest, 1 from Plymouth, and 1 from Freeland) for the second spot in the championship (to be held on Thursday at 4:30 PM in the auditorium of the Grace A. Dow Library).  Boomslang made it to the oral round last year and came up just short of making the championship (here is a link to a photo).

Out of the ~ 45 questions they received on Saturday they only missed two, so we knew they had done very well.  However, they had lost one of the battles, and the way points are assigned makes it hard to predict your performance (since you don’t know how well the other teams did).  When the emcee announced that Boomslang would be moving on to the championship battle, we were surprised and thrilled!  It wasn't even very close this time since there was a large cushion of points between Boomslang and the second place team.  Congratulations to the team and coach Marcelle for all of the hard work they’ve put in over the last several months!

Here are some photos of Boomslang:

Saturday morning Elliot participated in Midland Public Schools’ paddleton tournament along with ~ 60 (?) other 5th grade boys.  Paddleton is like badminton except you use a wooden paddle instead of a stringed racquet.  A bunch of his friends from Carpenter Street school participated too, and they all did well…representing four out of the top six and three out of the top four (including the champion and runner-up).    Elliot defeated his friend (and basketball teammate) Kyle to win the tournament.

Here is some video from several of his matches leading up to the championship (and some video of his pals playing too):

Here is video of the championship match:

Here are some photos (the last one is Elliot and Finn posing with their gym teacher Mr. Welter):

Here are Elliot’s and Finn’s football photos from 2011.  My previous collection of mine is here: link.