The children's lit class met for the last time last night and we held six (6!) mock book award deliberations. Each student chose which award they wanted to judge and had free reign to nominate any eligible book. I'm pretty sure every last one of them also brought snacks to fuel their discussions.

You can see the nominated books at this post. We followed the ALA rules up to a point, given that we only had two hours and the committees had six, or seven members rather than fifteen. There was a Geisel, a Sibert, and four Caldecott committees. Unlike last year's class when all committees went to multiple ballots and one group finally had to flip a coin after five ballots, three of this year's groups had a winner on the first ballot!

Here they are:

               

Geisel: I Will Take a Nap!; Sibert: Finding Winnie; and the four Caldecotts had only one duplication, Float, winning on two committees while Drum Dream Girl and Last Stop on Market Street took the top slot on the other two.

After one book had a majority of members choosing it for first place, they discussed honor books. Here's what they chose:

          

Geisel had one honor book (Ling & Ting) and Sibert had two (Emmanuel's Dream and Trombone Shorty).

For the Caldecott groups, I was surprised to see only one overlap in the honor books:

  

       

   



At the end of our time, each committee presented its winner and honor books. The entire evening was such a big payoff for me as a teacher. I got to watch the students work collaboratively and mostly independent of instructors who were just there to answer questions about the process and make sure discussions remained focused on the all-important Terms & Criteria. The reasons they gave for choosing their winners were spot-on.

We read Charlotte's Web for this last class, and at the end of my time teaching I always feel like Wilbur watching Charlotte's babies fly away on the warm breeze, able to thrive on their own without help. With luck, a few of this year's students will be like Joy, Aranea, and Nellie and decide to stick around to write for this blog.