It’s a battle, but words are the weapons and knowledge is the victor for these multilingual 4th through 7th-grade students from across Santa Barbara County.
For the first time, they are competing in person in a Spanish-language battle of the books.
The students are huddled in small groups, each being asked questions that are pulled from an envelope about books that they have read from a designated list. If they don’t get the answer correct, the opposing team can answer — or steal — and there will only be one winner, as Melissa Garcia, coordinator of language education services for Santa Barbara County education services, explains, and that’s linguistics.
"We're really excited that they are really exercising their full linguistic repertoire here at the event," said Garcia.
"We really were intentional about making sure that the language of presentation is Spanish, but we wanted to make sure that students felt comfortable using their whole linguistic repertoire as they participate and engage, either using English or Spanish, but of course, knowing that they would likely lean into their Spanish as they got more comfortable with each other and with the format of the questions and response," she said.
Allison is a 5th grader and one of the students taking part. She said it’s been fun preparing for the competition by reading the books.
"I love reading a lot. It helps me understand what people think about certain things."
Of the competition being in Spanish, she said, "It feels special because you learn a new language and it helps your brain develop faster."
Fourth grader Eniko is also in the competition and said that for a while, her team was in the lead.
"It's difficult, but it's also fun to just have the chance to be able to do this," said Eniko.
"What a beautiful thing to be bilingual or trilingual," said Tere Jurado, who is judging the final round. " That's the way to connect, to make bridges between these different communities. Because these kids are absolutely our future. They are gonna be our next doctors, lawyers, architects, business owners, parents."
"You have a superpower when you have different languages," said Jurado.
The 1st place team was Los Multi Leodores with students from Adams Elementary, McKinley Elementary, Roberto and Dr Francisco Jimenez Elementary, and Solvang School.
