According to our Social Studies Department's tradition, the couple of days after winter break are used to administer the qualifying rounds of the National Geography Bee sponsored by National Geographic Magazine, and held each year for students in grades 6-12.

Each Cluster at Pollard and High Rock will find a winner, and each grade level will have runoffs to determine a school representative for the regional championships. Eventually, students compete for the state championship, the winner of which will represent Massachusetts at the national competition in Washington, D.C.

The first rounds were held in our cluster today. There are seven rounds, and each student has an opportunity to earn one point for a correct answer in each round. Rounds one through three consisted of a series of questions with the name of a U.S. state as the answer. Rounds five through seven. A couple of blocks even started Round Four, in which all of the answers are one of the seven continents. We'll finish the entire preliminaries by tomorrow, and hopefully have a school-wide winner for High Rock by the end of the week.



If you are interested in knowing more about the Bee, the prizes, and previous years' winners, just check out this link:

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/geobee/