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by John Nolan

Primary school quiz

April 1, 2015 in Quizzes

school-testOne year on from the quiz I hosted in aid of the local primary school, I was again invited to provide the questions for 2015’s event. The school staff also asked me to host once again but, alas, due to family reasons I couldn’t.

After being impressed with the number of school children who attended last year’s quiz, I decided to make this year’s questions a bit more child-friendly. I have since been told that this worked out well as there were even more kids in attendance this year!

However, in amongst questions about nursery rhyme characters, medieval history and ‘make and do’, I also endeavoured to place at least one (if not two) tough questions in each round – to keep adult teams interested.

Hopefully that worked out and I wasn’t being cursed by the all-grown-ups teams in the room…

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by John Nolan

Kids these days: answers

March 15, 2011 in Culture, Quizzes

Here are the answers to the questions posted yesterday in Kids these days… All of them.

It became the post with the most comments ever on this site so it obviously piqued some interest.  Yes, I know five comments doesn’t exactly put boards.ie under threat but it’s a big deal here.  You’re a quiet bunch.

The questions are pretty impressive.  I got into quizzing when I was in primary school but unfortunately I remained the big fish in a small pond as our school quiz team never actually took part in any competitions! I have one vague but pleasant memory of my mother returning home from a parent-teacher meeting and telling me that, whilst academically I was “doing well”, my teacher had been much more impressed that I’d known the name of  Cardinal Ó Fiaich* in a quiz he’d called out from a newspaper.  It had been about three weeks beforehand but he still remembered it when the P/T meeting came along.  Well, I was about 8 at the time!

Anyway, this is just to illustrate my belief that the quizzing kids of today no doubt got most of these questions right.

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Profile photo of John Nolan

by John Nolan

Kids these days…

March 14, 2011 in Culture, Quizzes

The Irish League of Credit Unions has held a nationwide quiz for primary school teams for the last 20 years.

The quiz takes place over three rounds.  Individual Credit Unions hold a local quiz for the schools in their catchment area with the winners of this going on to take part in the ‘Chapter’ round.  There are 25 credit union chapters in Ireland, regions basically, and the winners and runners-up from these qualify for an All-Ireland final in Dublin in April.  Furthermore, the quiz is divided into two sections: Competition A (for children up to 11 years) and Competition B (children aged 11-13).

This is clearly a very well-run event.  The questions are provided centrally and are preceded by a lengthy foreword advising local quiz masters as to how to carry out their duties:

  • Each question is read out twice
  • All six questions are repeated at the end of each round
  • Answer sheets are to be collected after two minutes
  • The answers to round 1 are given when round 2 has been collected, and so on
  • It is recommended that there should be one corrector per 10 teams
  • When the answer is a person’s name, accept the surname
  • Exact spelling of words is relevant only for spelling questions

Now, that’s a useful list for all quiz masters and organisers, not just those involving primary school children.

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