While every year I celebrate Caldecott winners with my students, this is the first year we are having our own Mock Caldecott competition. After perusing numerous other Mock Caldecott lists and lists of Caldecott predictions, I narrowed it down to eleven titles to share with my class. There was a LOT of rethinking and eliminating titles. In the end, I tried to choose a varied list that conveyed different moods, feelings and responses.
Here are the books we are sharing, reading and swooning over – shared alphabetically by illustrator:
Sparky! written by Jenny Offill and illustrated by Chris Appelhans
Quest by Aaron Becker
The Promise written by Nicola Davies and illustrated by Laura Carlin
Draw! by Raúl Colón
The Farmer and the Clown by Marla Frazee
The Iridescence of Birds: A Book about Henri Matisse written by Patricia MacLachlan with illustrations by Hadley Hooper
Sam & Dave Dig a Hole written by Mac Barnett and illustrated by Jon Klassen
Hi, Koo! by Jon J Muth
The Girl and the Bicycle by Mark Pett
The Right Word: Roget and His Thesaurus written by Jen Bryant and illustrated by Melissa Sweet
Grandfather Gandhi written by Arun Gandhi and Bethany Hegedus and illustrated by Evan Turk
Our process is simple. We read and talk about each book individually, enjoying the interactive read aloud experience. Then, I hide the book away until we bring them all out again and spend some time looking closer at each title with Caldecott criteria in mind.
Like others who are running a Mock Caldecott with their classrooms, I adapted the criteria into a child friendly rubric.
Each child will have an opportunity to rate each book using a 1 – 5 scale (with 1 being not at all to 5 being agree absolutely) responding to these three statements:
This book is a book kids will really appreciate.
The illustrations in this book are excellent in quality.
The illustrations are a great fit for the story being told.
An opportunity to comment on favourites will also be available.
By next week, we should have shared all of the titles and will be prepared to rate each book. We will do this over a morning where we can reread, look more closely at the actual criteria and have lots of discussions with other students and the adults we have invited to participate in this process with us. More details on our class blog: Curiosity Racers.
We will then announce our medal winner and 3 honour titles.
I am not sure if it is the children or the adults who are more excited but our room is buzzing even more with picture book love. At times I am sure I can hear the hum 🙂
Can’t wait to read their ratings!
I know! I am very excited to see which book comes out on top. And why . . .
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What a great idea to do with your class!! I will be waiting anxiously to see the results!!!
Me too! I have no idea which book will come out on top! But all so far are beloved.
Love the books you chose! That must have been a hard decision. I am looking forward to reading about what the kids think.
Such a hard decision! But I knew we were dealing with limited time and I wanted to really try and expose the children to a variety of texts that might/should be considered – wordless, nonfiction, different emotions/themes portrayed ete
Reblogged this on A Year in Mom's Kitchen and commented:
This is how we grow passionate readers and thinkers. Excited to hear which of these books the students choose!
With each book, they get a new favourite! So this will be interesting!
Great! So excited to see what your students will choose. Makes me wish I had a classroom again to share all this pre award excitement!
Excitement, indeed! The students are loving this process. And of course, all of the books!
Huh… I reblogged this, but … it ended up on my new family recipe blog and for the life of me I don k’tnow how to change that! Folks are visiting it, anyway. I can’t reblog a reblog to change where it shows up, it seems. I’m enjoying following all your adventures in books, at any rate!
🙂 Book love, food love . . . it’s all good 🙂