Monday, January 18, 2010

Newbery & Caldecott Winners; MLK Day

The ALA has announced the 2010 Newbery and Caldecott winners! Congratulations to Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me, this year's Newbery recipient, and Jerry Pinkney's The Lion and the Mouse, this year's Caldecott winner. We know the latter but not the former this time around. As always, I'm looking forward to lots of good reading based on the list. You can find the full listing (including all honor books) at the ALA site here.

It's Martin Luther King Jr. day, of course, a day when we always read a book together about King. This year it was My Brother Martin, a picture book written by King's older sister Christine King Farris with wonderful illustrations by Chris Soentpiet. Last year we read David Adler's A Picture Book of Martin Luther King Jr. I also highly recommend The Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., a video presentation that includes the entire "I Have a Dream" speech. If you've never watched and heard that speech in its entirety, it's very much worth your time to track it down (via this video or other means) to do so.

2 comments:

Erin said...

I haven't seen either of those books, but I presume the latter is the Aesop story? That's one of my favorites.

I took a class on King in college and have a couple of books with several of his speeches in it. I should pull them out and do some reading...

Beth said...

Yes, it's the Aesop story, retold completely in pictures. Really gorgeous. Apparently the book was a complete shoo-in for the award this year!

I'd heard about Stead's book (the Newbery winner) but hadn't gotten around to it yet. I went to put it on hold in the library system and found about 50 people had gotten there ahead of me. Heh. I can't even imagine what winning a Newbery must do for someone's career!

I may end up reviewing the King picture book we read yesterday. S. really responded to it wonderfully, especially the artwork. She had it back out today just marveling over the pictures and pointing out all her favorites.