Mock Caldecott Unit

Welcome back!  For the month of January, our students in grades 2-4 participated in a Mock Caldecott Unit!  For this unit, we read six books that were contenders for the 2015 Caldecott Award.  Then, the students voted for which book they thought should win the award and which books should be the honor (runner-up) book.  Finally, students had to tell why they chose the books that they did.  The six books we read were:

This is the document that the students used to vote with:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wn4NNCU-RfxsFzRSwJmJbVp8hoCtO_dbPjCa6dtb-X0/edit?usp=sharing

We were excited to find out that The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend won the actual Caldecott Award and Sam and & Dave Dig a Hole was an honor book!  These were two of our favorites as well!!

Our friends from Old Bethpage Elementary School in New York are reading the same six books that we read and then we hope to Skype with them at the end of February.  We can't wait to compare notes and see if students in both schools liked the same books!

We will definitely do this unit again next year as there were so many benefits!  Students were exposed to high quality literature.  They had fun reading the stories with a purpose in mind...to rate the books for their illustrations and overall quality.  The students had to justify their choices through writing.  Finally, it was fun seeing which books won for our school and then which books won the actual award!