The winners of the Star of the North Award, Minnesota's student choice picture book award, were announced last week. I know that a lot of NDA students will be happy to see the books that won first, second, and third place!
At the same time the winners for 2016 were announced, the list of nominees for next year's award were revealed. Go to the Star of the North Nominees page to learn more about each of the titles listed in the poll below and then cast your vote for the nominee you are most excited about.
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Thank you to these cool girls for donating fantastic picture books about other cool (fictional) girls. Come to the library to check out Spring Fever and/or Rosie Revere, Engineer!
Over the weekend, the winners of the 2016 MHL Awards were announced at an event at the Red Balloon Bookshop in St. Paul. Here they are: Division I Division II The 2016-2017 nominees have been announced as well. Go check them out at the Maud Hart Lovelace website and comment with which one you are most excited to read!
Last Monday, author and illustrator Mike Wohnoutka spent the morning teaching, entertaining, and inspiring our youngest students. He is probably best known at NDA as the illustrator of the Star of the North winning book, Moo!, but he has illustrated many more books and has recently written and illustrated a couple of equally charming books, Little Puppy and the Big Green Monster and Dad's First Day. Mr. Wohnoutka first presented to the preschoolers, kindergarteners, and first graders and then to the second and third graders. We learned about his childhood (both a troublemaker and a good student), education (inspired by author/illustrator David Shannon at Savannah College of Art and Design), and his writing process (including lots of editing, of course!). Mr. Wohnoutka also taught the students a bit about illustrating as he pulled their creative ideas into some amusing drawings for us to keep. If you'd like to learn more about Mike Wohnoutka and his wonderful picture books, check out his website at http://www.mikewohnoutka.com/.
As the pictures below suggest, this year's Scholastic Bookfair was a ton of fun! First, the strong sixth graders cleared out the Volunteer Room (Room 102) and then a whirlwind of awesome library volunteers moved in and transformed the space into a beautiful bookstore. We opened on the afternoon of January 22nd with enthusiastic parents and students enjoying the great selection of books and just closed up shop yesterday after our last classroom came through. Many, many books went home with students and many more were purchased by our teachers and by families for classroom and library donations. Thank you to all who shopped and to all who gave their time to make this year's Scholastic Bookfair a great success. Stay tuned to see some of the excellent new books we will purchase for the library with our earnings!
Congratulations to Gene Luen Yang! This highly-regarded graphic novelist was recently named National Ambassador for Young People's Literature by the Librarian of Congress. Mr. Yang's first graphic novel, American Born Chinese, was a National Book Award finalist and received the Printz Award from the American Library Association. His most recent graphic novel is called Secret Coders, illustrated by Mike Holmes, and is first in a series in which the story involves solving puzzles and learning about computer programming. In other big children's literature news, the American Library Association's Youth Media Awards were announced last Monday morning. Check out the winners below and head over to the ALA site to see the honor books and the winners in many other categories! You'll see that Last Stop on Market Street not only won the Newbery Medal, but it also received a Caldecott Honor. This has only happened once before, with A Visit to William Blake's Inn (1981), written by Nancy Willard and illustrated by Alice and Martin Provenson.
Thanks to the donations of these fine fellows our sports section has grown quite a bit! We all appreciate birthday books, but if you're a football or hockey fan like these brothers, you are really in luck. Even if you're not into these sports, you might want to try Hockey Hero or The Highest Number in the World just for the great stories. Make sure to look for all of these new titles in the library!
One of the best parts of going back to school in January is that the wait to hear the announcement of the American Library Association's Youth Media Award winners is almost over. This year, the Caldecott, Newbery, and other ALA award winners will be revealed on the morning of January 11th. If you can't wait until then to get opinions on the best of the best children's and young adult books published in 2015, you might want to consult one of the lists below. The Washington Post list includes It's Only Stanley by Jon Agee, my favorite new picture book read-aloud of the fall. Can you find any of your favorites in these lists? Best Children's Books of 2015 from The Washington Post Best Illustrated Children's Books of 2015 from The New York Times NPR's Guide to 2015's Great Reads - This link brings you to the books on the list that are tagged as Kids' Books. If you'd like to see all books, just click "Clear Filters" on the left side of the screen. Hover over a book cover to read its review. Some of my favorite picture books are those that teach about the lives of real people. We have many of these in our library that are written for various age levels and that provide wonderful illustrations along with interesting stories. Below are cover pictures from just a few of these books: Several weeks ago, the seventh graders started off a biographical research project by selecting and reading one of these picture book biographies. They then further researched their subject and prepared a short slideshow to be shared with the third graders. The focus for this project was on navigating within and using the features of the Britannica School Middle encyclopedia (available through ELM4You.org) and on searching for online images that they would be free to use (not copyright-restricted). Seventh graders were expected to provide citations for each of their sources, including each of the images in their slideshow.
Last week, I set up time for the seventh graders to share their work with the third graders. Thank you to Mrs. Gross and Mr. Dopp for sharing their students and class time to make this experience possible! |
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