Miss Kelly & I are very excited to be co-chairing a discussion group for this year's Mock Caldecott at SCLS, the Suffolk Cooperative Library System. We met briefly last week with our friend Alison O'Reilly, the SCLS Youth Services Consultant, and fellow children's librarians Christine Dengel and Julie DeLaney. Boy did we have a hard time narrowing our wonderful piles of books down.
We are only considering 8 books this year and there are so many that have Caldecott potential. After careful deliberation we came up with a list of books that we will spend the next few weeks obsessing over with the Caldecott Criteria and art terms and philosophy. We will also look at these books using Megan Lambert's storytime model called The Whole Book Approach. Megan is an outreach associate for the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art (she helped us last year with our Carle outreach program, thanks again Megan!) who developed this method of examining books by looking at all of its elements such as the jacket, spine, cover, format, endpapers, front matter, gutter, type and art medium/style. We will ask ourselves what we see and then ask again why do we see it, or what, specifically, makes us say that? This approach emphasizes the visual and encourages active seeing instead of just simply listening to the story.
But mainly we are going to have to train ourselves not to say "I Love It!" or "It's Soooo Cute!". You won't hear anyone on the actual Caldecott Committee saying those things - although I'm sure they do when there's no one "official" around. :) So, note to self: I have to remember not to say how incredibly awesome it would be for Jonathan and the Big Blue Boat to win because I love it and want to be adopted by Philip and Erin because they are an incredibly awesome, talented, charming and sooo cute couple and lounging on the couch with their scruffy pup in their incredibly awesome Michigan house filled with incredibly awesome kitschy things while smelling some incredibly awesome baking and watching them create beautiful artwork at their respective tables would be an incredibly awesome way to spend a day. So, yeah, cannot say that....
So far, the online class that Kelly & I are taking - The Caldecott Medal: Understanding Distinguished Art in Picture Books, instructed by Kathleen T. Horning - has been very informative and inspirational. I'm sure it will be greatly helpful in our 2012 Mock Caldecott endeavor. Interested in art & picture books? Pick up Kathleen's book From Cover to Cover; Evaluating and Reviewing Children's Books & come up with a list of your very own of Caldecott considerations!
Here are the books we will be looking at:
A Ball for Daisy by Christopher Raschka
Brother Sun, Sister Moon by Katherine Paterson, ill. by Pamela Dalton
Grandpa Green by Lane Smith
Heart and Soul by Kadir Nelson
The House Baba Built by Ed Young
Jonathan and the Big Blue Boat by Philip C. Stead
The Man in the Moon by William Joyce
Where's Walrus by Stephen Savage
