Children’s Classics Award Winners — December

Our six months are coming to an end, and I for one have had a wonderful time sharing some award winning children’s books that I have enjoyed with my children or on my own this year. I tried to highlight books for children of varied ages, and I kept most of my focus on awards from the American Library Association: the Caldecott Medal in July, the Newbery Medal in August, the Theodor Seuss Geisel Award in September, and the Coretta Scott King Book Awards in October. In November, I looked at past Cybils Award winners, a more recently established award chosen by book blogger judges. This month, I wanted to focus on another ALA award, the Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Medal.

The Sibert Award honors the most distinguished informational book published in English in the preceding year for its significant contribution to children’s literature.

I have to admit that I wanted to challenge myself a little by choosing this award to highlight, because nonfiction is not my usual go-to genre. When I saw the list of 2010 Honor Books, though, I immediately recognized a book that I had heard about and had intended to read. It was serendipity, and I’m incredibly thankful that I picked this book up at my library.

Phillip Hoose’s Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice is a 2010 Honor Book, in addition to also being a National Book Award winner, a Newbery Honor Book, and receiving several more awards. No doubt about it in my mind, this book deserves all this praise and more.

I’m ashamed to say that I had never heard of Claudette Colvin before reading this, and now I’m anxious to share this book with my own children so that I can help make sure that this incredible figure in the civil rights movement isn’t forgotten by another generation. Colvin has an incredible story, and she helps to tell it herself in Hoose’s book, which is flawlessly presented with personal memories shared by key figures, photographs and newspaper articles and images that were just so difficult for me to process and believe. As a child in the 80s, it seemed that the civil rights movement was SO long before my time, but as an adult now, I cannot fathom how this was all happening during my parents’ infancy years. Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice is a must read book for people of all ages- and should be highlighted in every school library.

It’s been a blast talking about award winning children’s books with you all over the last six months! We’d love for you to link up with us for this final post.

Editor’s note: This is it for this particular monthly Tuesday carnival. We will be continuing with What’s on Your Nightstand the 4th Tuesday of each month, but we are letting the others go after this month. However, stay tuned for the announcement of the Cybils Challenge, hopefully to come in the next week.

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Dawn hasn’t received many awards in her day (except for the coveted “Meanest Mommy in the World” title, more often than she’d like), but she is kind of a big deal on her blog, my thoughts exactly.