I have two sections each of 6th-8th grade in my middle school. All students see me at least once a week for check-out and for support in projects they are working on with their traditional classroom teachers, but one homeroom at each grade level sees me a second time during the week where we focus on digital citizenship, media literacy, and other special topics. At the semester break, we switch and the other homeroom gets the extra attention. Visual literacy was one of the special topics I worked on with these students. As part of their final project, my middle schoolers selected books and set the criteria for younger students to vote in our building mock Caldecott vote.
Students created a likert scale and a point system for evaluating books based upon the Caldecott criteria. A book could receive:
0-2 points “Do you think this is an exceptional picture book?”
0-2 points “Did you like the book?”
1-5 points “Did the artist show excellence in execution of the technique they used?”
1-5 points “Did the artist show excellence of pictorial interpretation of story, theme, or concept?”
1-5 points “Was the style of illustration appropriate to the story, theme, or concept?”
1-5 points “Did the illustrations delineate plot, theme, characters, setting, mood or information through the pictures?”
1-5 points “Do the illustrations show excellence of presentation in recognition of a child audience?”
Lastly they had to gauge the intended audience for the book. A book that might be excellent for a 5th grader might not appeal to a kindergartener or vice versa.
I brought in 50 picture books for my evaluators to look at during their voting process. While not every student looked at every book, each title had at least 5 evaluations. Based on these results, the top 6 were read by the whole class … or a substantial excerpt in the cases of Pilu of the Woods and Infinite Hope due to time constraints. Each class then narrowed the selection to 3 books. I have supplemented their selections with a few of my own. My student picks:
Grade 6: A Big Bed for Little Snow, At the Mountain’s Base, Field Trip to the Moon
Grade 7: I am Perfectly Designed (by Karomo Brown… a great SEL book but complete shocker to me from the art perspective), A Place to Land, The Undefeated
Grade 8: Truman, Fly! and a three way tie for third between, The Little Guys, Pilu of the Woods and Two Brothers Four Hands
I added A Stone Sat Still, Fry Bread, and Saturday to their selections
We shall see what the school and the committee decide on the 27th!