The 2025 Mock Caldecott List

Looking for a printable copy the 2025 Mock Caldecott score sheet? Pop in your email below and it’ll come right to your inbox!

This marks my eighth year of hosting a (very low-key) Mock Caldecott list and I’ve loved having so many of you participate in reading and picking your own winners from the Caldecott nominees (there are no official Caldecott nominees – this list is full of books getting a lot of buzz and who I think would be nominated if there were nominees), and then comparing them to the official Caldecott winners chosen by the American Library Association each winter.

The 2025 Caldecott Winners will be named on January 27th which means it’s time for a 2025 Mock Caldecott Book List (the live stream will be here if you want to see the winners announced in real time).

If you’re unfamiliar with the Caldecott award, it’s an award given to the artist of the most distinguished American picture book published in the previous year (“most distinguished” according to the panel of judges made up of librarians and other people involved in children’s literature that year – you have to be elected or appointed to be one of the judges).

Each year, the winner (and any chosen Honor books – usually 3 or 4)) are awarded in January or early February at the American Library Association conference and watching the live stream of the announcements is one of my favorite things of the year.

When we lived in Boston and I was an elementary school librarian, ALA Midwinter was held in Boston (perfect timing!) and because the announcements were made on MLK Day, I was out of school and was able to be at the announcements in person which was one of the highlights of my professional life. You cannot IMAGINE the energy of thousands of children and young adult book lovers packed in a room ROARING with joy when their favorite books snagged awards.

I’ve done Mock Caldecotts as a grad student, as a student librarian and as an elementary school librarian and now it’s really fun to do as a family and see how our picks match up with what actually won.

I’ve loved having so many of you join in the fun with your classrooms or families over the past few years and if you’d like to do it again this year, I’ve come up with a list of Caldecott predictions for 2025 and have checked out as many of them from the library as I can.

I printed off score sheets with a list of all the titles of the Caldecott books I chose and then as we read them, we rate them according to the Caldecott criteria.

I spent a long time reviewing books that are getting buzz as Caldecott contenders, so your odds of at least one of them being picked as a Caldecott winner or a Caldecott honor book are pretty good.

I made a score sheet with each of the books and then the four criteria:

1. How well is the art executed? (Basically, is this good art?)
2. How does the art match the story? Is the style and medium a good fit for the tone and feeling of the storyline or theme? (In a nutshell, if it’s a happy, cheerful book, does the art reflect that, or if it’s a serious, sad book, does that art match that?)
3. Is the art important to the story? (Do you get insight into the story, the characters, or additional details through the art that you wouldn’t get if you were just reading the text without any art?)
4. Does it have a child audience in mind? The award isn’t for the most popular book, but it does need to have children as the primary audience.

On the score sheet, there’s a spot after every book to score it on each piece of the criteria between 1-5. Once we read all the books, we tally up all the scores and determine our Caldecott winner, plus pick a few Caldecott Honor books (there is technically no limit to how many Caldecott Honor books can be chosen, but it’s usually 2-4).

If you’d like a copy of the score sheet with all the Caldecott nominee book titles on it, pop in your email address below and it’ll come straight to your inbox!

The other thing I always reminded my students of and do the same with my kids now is that it’s okay if the judges choose different things than you do. Some years, you might quirk an eyebrow at their picks and other years they might be right in line with the books you picked as winners. That’s part of the fun – if we all had exactly the same taste and liked exactly the same things, there wouldn’t be any suspense about the picks because we’d all choose the same titles.

Here are the 20 books I put on my Mock Caldecott predictions list this year (this is a big list because it’s so disappointing when your library only has a handful and I wanted to increase the odds that you could get a fat stack of options to read and rate together! For younger kids, this can be WAY overwhelming, so feel free to pick 5-10 and just compare those. There are no rules that say you need to read all 20! Make it fun for your family or classroom, not something stressful or overwhelming).

The 2025 Mock Caldecott

1. The Yellow Bus by Loren Long
2. The Table by Winsome Bingham and Wiley Blevins, illustrated by Jason Griffin
3. Being Home by Traci Sorell
4. Wild Places: The Life of Naturalist David Attenborough by Hayley Rocco
5. My Daddy Is a Cowboy by Stephanie Seales, illustrated by C.G. Esperanza
6. Jump for Joy by Karen Gray Ruelle, illustrated by Hadley Hooper
7. The Last Zookeeper by Aaron Becker
8. Chooch Helped by Andrea L. Rogers, illustrated by Rebecca Lee Kunz
9. Home in a Lunchbox by Cherry Mo
10. Just Like Millie by Lauren Castillo
11. Joyful Song: A Naming Story by Lesléa Newman, illustrated by Susan Gal
12. Two Together by Brendan Wenzel
13. Solar Bear by Beth Ferry
14. Touch the Sky by Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic, illustrated by Chris Park
15. The House Before Falling into the Sea by Ann Suk Wang
16. Ahoy! by Sophie Blackall
17. Partly Cloudy by Deborah Freedman
18. The Ship in the Window by Travis Jonker, illustrated by Matthew Cordell
19. The Last Stand by Antwan Eady, illustrated by Jerome Pumphrey and Jarrett Pumphrey
20. Time to Make Art by Jeff Mack

If you liked this post about Caldecott predictions for 2025, you might also like these other posts:

• The 2025 Reading Log
• The 2024 List of 100 Picture Books
• The 12 Books I Read Aloud to My Children This Year