Stand-Out Cybils Nominated Picture Books, #10

Another Friday, another round-up of Cybils-nominated picture books for you. This time, though, I’m taking a moment to highlight three picture books intended not for the youngest set, but for slightly older, more sophisticated readers of the older elementary school age set. More serious and thoughtful topics are addressed here than with the majority of the previous titles I’ve written about.

A few years ago, a friend/teaching colleague of mine spent two summers in Kenya, working at a children’s home. The photos from her trips showed a group of children so eager to connect and learn, and she spoke highly about the experience of teaching children the English language. Though James Rumford’s Rain School takes place in the country of Chad, I was reminded of the fact that around the world, there are children whose schooling experiences are vastly different than those that I take for granted for my own children. Though the text is not very complex, the idea of children building their own school each year only to see it washed away in the rainy season could be fairly mind-blowing for many young readers. The sketchy-illustrations are interesting and give a feeling of immediacy, just as the cover shows.

Though picture books, especially wordless ones, are usually thought of for only preschoolers to young elementary school kids, Jeannie Baker’s Mirror is a difficult-to-categorize picture book. Young children will be drawn in by the illustrations, though I’m not sure they’ll get the “big picture” concept as older children will. When you open the cover, you’re taken to the very middle of the book as the starting point, with two separate books contained within. On the left, scenes of a family living in the author’s native Sydney, Australia are depicted, while on the right, the pages show a family in Morocco, North Africa. As the title suggests, the images shown in intricate collage, are intended to convey similarities of people, families, and experiences from very different parts of the world. Honestly, the illustrations are captivating, and the effect can be profound on readers who may not have much concept of countries outside of their own.

There are parts of our own American history that are painful to share with our children. How do you tell children about a time under Jim Crow laws when African-American people were treated with vast inequality? Books like White Water, by Michael S. Bandy and Eric Stein, help to bring the big picture down to a personal level. The story of a young boy who dares to defy the “Whites Only” sign above the water fountain in town puts a realistic face to a complex and uncomfortable topic. His discovery that the same pipe feeds the two fountains helps him continue to stay strong in a world in which he is treated as a second-class citizen, for he knows that some things are only an illusion and not a truth. “Maybe everything I thought I couldn’t do was just in my imagination, too. That’s when I realized– I could do anything.” Powerful words for any child.

Though I am a Round I panelist in this Fiction Picture Book category for the Cybils, my opinions are solely my own and are not meant to reflect the final outcome.

Don’t miss a thing: Check out our current giveaways. Subscribe to our feed or video reviews on YouTube. Follow us @5M4B on Twitter or on Facebook.

Dawn juggles teaching, parenting, and reading on a daily basis, sometimes hopping back over to give her blog, my thoughts exactly, a bit of attention, too.