The ALA Youth Media Awards are coming on Monday! (Livestream here on 1/27/25 at 8 am MT.) This is the Super Bowl of the kidlit world, when many of the major book awards are announced including the Newbery and Caldecott Awards. Every year, I try to have my students participate in at least one mock awards vote.
The past few years we've enjoyed Melissa Stewart's Sibert Smackdown. The Sibert Medal is for informational fiction (nonfiction), and each year Melissa shares her slate of top books for schools to host their own Mock Sibert voting. In coordination with our school librarian, my 5th graders have spent the past month reading, analyzing, and discussing their favorites among this year's choices.
We read aloud different books with each class, and it was interesting to see how much the voting was swayed by books we read aloud vs. books the students read and discussed in pairs.
And the Winners Are ...
In my first class, the winner was One Day This Tree Will Fall by Leslie Barnard Booth and illustrated by Stephanie Fizer Coleman! Our honor books were...
- Life After Whale by Lynn Brunelle and Jason Chin
- What's Inside a Bird's Nest by Rachel Ignotofsky
- Growing Up Under a Red Flag: A Memoir of Surviving the Chinese Cultural Revolution by Ying Chang Compestine and Xinmei Liu (This was was not from the Sibert Smackdown list but was a student favorite.)
In my second class, the winner was Narwhal: Unicorn of the Arctic by Candace Fleming and illustrated by Deena So'Oteh.
The honors books were...
- Almost Underwear: How a Piece of Cloth Traveled from Kitty Hawk to the Moon and Mars by Jonathan Roth
- The Painter and the President: Gilbert Stuart's Brush with George Washington by Sarah Albee and illustrated by Stacy Innerst
- Urban Coyotes by Mary Kay Carson and illustrated by Tom Uhlman
Bonus content: photo of the "Almost Underwear" taken over winter break at the Wright Brothers National Monument in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
Who are your top choices for the awards this year! Share a guess in the comments below!
Want more of my 5th graders' favorite books? Click here for all of our #iLoveMG posts.
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