As the time grows near for the January 27th
announcement of the 2014 Caldecott Medal winner, libraries all over the country are choosing
their own “mock” Caldecott winners. There are even blogs like Calling Caldecott and A Fuse # 8 Production that are tracking the mock winners as a way of trying to predict just what
might actually win.
My library
certainly isn’t immune to this “mock fever” and we recently chose our own
“mock-mock” 2014 Caldecott Medal winner for 2014. (Read on for why it’s a
“mock-mock”). Our choice was “Mr. Wuffles,” written and illustrated by David
Wiesner. (His brief video on the making of the book is well worth watching). Meanwhile, we had three
“mock-mock” 2014 Caldecott Honor books: “Little Santa,” written and illustrated
by Jon Agee; “Big Snow,” written and illustrated by Jonathan Bean; and “The Day
the Crayons Quit,” written by Drew Daywalt and illustrated by Oliver Jeffers.
So, why do
I call our program a “mock-mock” Caldecott? Unlike most libraries where it’s
mostly adults who spend hours seriously discussing potential winners in a mock
Caldecott program, the voters at my library are as young as three years old. Crazy?
Yes, but it’s also hugely entertaining, and the program has been such a big
draw among library patrons of all ages that we’ve started subtitling it “a
family book club.” Young participants,
and their parents, tell me they learned how to really look – and analyze – the
illustrations in a picture book, a key skill in our highly visual world. And
the program also has been a great way to focus on books in an entertaining way
for various ages. As one parent told me, “It’s so wonderful to do something literary
with my kids.”
This is the
third year our library has done its own version of a mock Caldecott program.
When I decided to start the program, I had fond visions of arguing amicably for
hours with other adults or older kids over details in an illustration and
discussing whether a particular book met a key Caldecott criterion. It just
sounded like a heck of a lot of fun for anyone who loves children’s books (yes,
we can be a weirdly-focused bunch).
But the participants at our first meeting of
what I termed the “Caldecott Club” turned my carefully-laid plans upside down.
Instead of lots of adults eager to nitpick over Caldecott criteria, our
Caldecott Club participants were parents and their children, including many
preschoolers. These patrons all were fascinated by the idea of reading and
discussing together some of the best new picture books being published.
Who was I
to argue with success? So I decided to call our group a “mock-mock” Caldecott,
and just go with the flow. To help our youngest participants understand what we
were trying to do, I asked my talented library colleague Dave Burbank to
develop a list of “kid-friendly” Caldecott criteria. Dave broke down the key
points into language that even preschoolers could potentially grasp, and which certainly
could be understood by elementary students on up. We have used that criteria as
the framework for our monthly discussions since then although, truth be told,
it still can be quite challenging to keep a preschooler on track to discuss
illustrations in a book when they really want to talk about the story! But
that’s all part of the fun.
For the
first year, we offered our Caldecott Club once a month from October through
February. Each month, from October through January, we read several books
(using our “ELMO” overhead projector and a big screen so everyone could really
see the illustrations). At each of those meetings, we chose a winner and then
in January, we took those four monthly winners (including the January pick) and
voted on our choice for the mock Caldecott Medal. The other three books were
our mock Caldecott Honors. Then, in February, we gathered once more to read the
actual Caldecott Medal and Caldecott Honor books.
Last year,
we added another dimension to celebrate the 75th birthday of the
Caldecott Medal. Instead of just meeting for five months, we went almost
year-round and, in addition to potential new Caldecott Medal winners, we read
some classic Caldecott winners from each decade.
This year,
we went back to the initial format and will conclude our current Caldecott Club
in February, when we read the actual 2014 winners. From October through our
early January meeting, we read and discussed 16 picture books, all chosen from
the booklist developed by the Calling Caldecott blog. Of course, we couldn’t read everything
on the list and, in choosing what we did read, I tried to think of our
audience, which obviously skews pretty young. That means we didn’t read some
terrific, but longer, potential 2014 Caldecott Medal winners like “Locomotive”
by Brian Floca. But every family at our meetings got a copy of the “Calling
Caldecott” list, and many parents used it as a guide for reading the books we
didn’t get to discuss in our get-togethers.
Now it’s
the time that we all get to wait until the actual 2014 Caldecott Committee
members make their choices behind closed and locked doors. (Although one
committee member recently gave Calling Caldecott a peek into what it’s like in the weeks leading up to the panel’s final discussions;
it’s definitely worth a read.) Meanwhile, all of our library’s “mock-mock”
Caldecott participants are full of questions. Will “Mr. Wuffles” really win and
make David Wiesner the first person to win four Caldecott Medals? Or will the
winner be “Journey,” written and illustrated by Aaron Becker or “Mr. Tiger Goes
Wild,” written and illustrated by Peter Brown – two of the top choices of many
library “mock” groups.? Or will the winning book be something completely out of
the blue? Check in on January 27th for the answer!
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