Officially, the Caldecott Medal is part of the Youth Media Awards. Each year the American Library Association honors books, videos and other materials for children and teens. Perhaps the most famous of these awards are the Newbery for distinguished children’s book and Caldecott for exceptional illustrations in a children’s book. There are other important awards that make up the Youth Media Awards.
The Theodor Seuss Geisel Award is given to authors and illustrators for the most distinguished American book for beginning readers. The Coretta Scott King Award is given to an outstanding African American Author and Illustrator for children and young adult literature that demonstrates an appreciation of African American culture and universal human values. The Michael L. Printz Award is given to the best book written for teens. There are other awards given but these 5 seem to be the most well known.
If you have been following this blog you know that St. Philip’s students in Kindergarten through 5th grade are participating in a Mock Caldecott. We have been looking extensively at 26 book that have a good chance of being the one chosen to receive such high an honor. Students have been critiquing and reading, over and over again. You can look at the criteria they followed here. This is the last week of voting and it has been fun. The students have surprised me many times over. Books I thought they would love they did and didn’t and books I thought they wouldn’t get into as much well, they did and didn’t. I have started to tally up the votes and critiques and even those have surprised me. I plan on spending much of my weekend adding up the scores. I even created a spreadsheet in my Google Drive to aide me. I must say, for someone who has always claimed to have zero math skills, I did manage to put together a pretty nifty spreadsheet. And so it goes…
If you would like to watch the live results of all the ALA Youth Media Awards you can! They stream it online starting at 8AM EST. That’s 5AM for us West Coasters. I plan on watching. I am very very excited to see if the book St. Philip chose is the book the committee chooses. The results of our Mock Caldecott will be announced on this blog on Monday and during morning announcements on Tuesday.
If you would like the watch the awards you can find the information on this Youtube video from the ALA
The Falcon's Fables 
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