We are wrapping up our Caldecott predictions this week by reading All Because You Matter, written by Tami Charles with illustrations by Bryan Collier.

Bryan Collier has won four Caldecott Honours for his previous books, including one for Trombone Shorty, which you can watch a read aloud for here.
The art in this book is inspired by Collier’s grandmother, who was a quilt maker. The images in the story are created through collage and petal shapes which give it a quilted appearance. The author was inspired to write this story from the racial justice movements we’ve seen in 2020 and saw this book as a starting point to have conversations about racism and equity.

I thought this was a great book to end our Caldecott unit with as we get closer to February and Black History Month.

Next week I will post about the results of Oppenheimer’s own voting for best illustrations, and we’ll see our how results compare to the official annoucement!

This week we looked at two books that we don’t have yet in our collection at Oppenheimer, so I got them from the Vancouver Public Library.

Outside In has beautiful watercolour illustrations by Cindy Derby showing the magic of nature.

The illustrations by brothers Jerome and Jarrett Pumphrey in The Old Truck were created using over 250 stamps.

These two books show very different types of illustrations and both told such beautiful stories. I’ll be adding these two to the Oppenheimer library for sure!

This week we have continued our discussions around what makes picture book illustrations engaging, unique and deserving of a medal!

The books we’ve been reading this week are You Matter written and illustrated by Christian Robinson:

Lift written by Minh Le and illustrated by Dan Santat:

and Hike illustrated by Pete Oswald:

These are all books where the pictures tell the bulk of the story, and all of the story in Hike since there are no words at all!

In some classes we looked critically at the illustrations and rated them for how wide their appeal is and how talented we think the artist is and in some classes we picked our favourite so far and drew a picture inspired by the art.

I can’t wait to continue our exploration of more awesome books from 2020 next week!

The Caldecott Medal is an award given to the artist of “the most distinguished American picture book for children” (from the the award homepage) . It is given to one book each year, and has been awarded since 1938! There are also other books each year that are “honoured” by the Caldecott committee. The winner for 2021 will be announced at the end of January, and there are lots of predictions about what book might get it.

The Vancouver Public Library has a list of 34 books that are eligible to win this year that you can access here.

For the month of January I will be reading a selection of these predictions with classes and we will be thinking about our favourites and making guesses about which one we think might win.

This week we are reading We Are Water Protectors, written by Carole Lindstrom and illustrated by Michaela Goade. The pictures in this book are absolutely beautiful with vibrant colours and lots of movement. Here is a video of the author reading the book: