STAR Rally

The STAR Rally, which includes everyone via assemblies for each of grades 6, 7, 8, challenges teams of students to answer questions in math, English, science, social science, music, art and P.E. The winning team per grade level gets a class reward; e.g., a pizza party. Here's how it works; let's use grade 6 as an example: Grade 6 is divided up into four sections—called for instance Purple team, Red team, Orange team, Blue team—with each homeroom being assigned to sit in a certain section of the gym, and therefore to be on that color team. Each homeroom teacher on the Purple team quickly picks 4 students to go to the gym floor to be constestants; if there are 3 homerooms on the Purple team, it makes for 12 students on Purple on the gym floor. Similarly, Red, Orange and Blue assign 12 students to the gym floor. Next come the questions, displayed via PowerPoint on a large screen in the gym. The first question category is, say, Math, consisting of anywhere between 10 and 20 problems. As the questions are displayed at a fairly rapid clip, team members huddle, quickly discuss, and write down answers. Questions aren't multiple choice--you have to know and write answers. When question category changes to, say, English, a new group of 12 students per team is chosen to answer. And so forth for science, social science, music, art, P.E. Oh, by the way, if team members are stuck they can resort to asking for anyone in the audience who's on their team to help with the answers. Meantime, at a large whiteboard in the gym scorekeepers are tallying cumulative scores. Assistant principal Mr. Frank coordinates the STAR Rally, with counselor Mr. Kane responsible for the question sets.