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The 2023 Mock Caldecott List

Looking for a copy of the score sheet with all the book titles on it, pop in your email address below and it’ll come straight to your inbox!

This my sixth 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 2023 Caldecott Winners will be named on January 30th which means it’s time for a 2023 Mock Caldecott Book List!

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 possible Caldecott books 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 45 books I put on my Mock Caldecott 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 45! Make it fun for your family or classroom, not something stressful or overwhelming).

caldecott books 2023

The 2023 Mock Caldecott List

  1. Gibberish by Young Vo
  2. The Sun Is Late and So Is the Farmer by Philip C. Stead, illustrated by Erin E. Stead 
  3. Out of a Jar by Deborah Marcero
  4. Where Butterflies Fill the Skies by Zahra Marwan
  5. Lizzy and the Cloud by Terry Fan, illustrated by Eric Fan 
  6. Hot Dog by Doug Salati 
  7. Over and Under the Waves by Kate Messner, illustrated byChristopher Neal
  8. Farmhouse by Sophie Blackall 
  9. Nigel and the Moon by Antwan Eady, illustrated by Gracey Zhang
  10. John’s Turn by Mac Barnett, illustrated by Kate Berube 
  11. Love in the Library by Maggie Tokuda-Hall, illustrated by Yas Imamura 
  12. Knight Owl by Christopher Denise
  13. Berry Song by Michaela Goade
  14. Emile and the Field by Kevin Young, illustrated by Chioma Ebinama
  15. Pigeon and Cat by Edward Hemingway
  16. Blue: A History of the Color as Deep as the Sea and as Wide as the Sky by Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond, illustrated by Daniel Minter
  17. The Year We Learned to Fly by Jacqueline Woodson, illustrated by Rafael López 
  18. Powwow Day by Traci Sorell, illustrated by Madelyn Goodnight
  19. Witch Hazel by Molly Idle
  20. Tiny Dino by Deborah Freedman
  21. Kick Push by Frank Morrison
  22. Choosing Brave: How Mamie Till-Mobley and Emmett Till Sparked the Civil Rights Movement by Angela Joy, illustrated by Janelle Washington
  23. Carrimebac: The Town That Walked by David Barclay Moore, illustrated byJohn Holyfield 
  24. To Change a Planet by Christina Soontornvat, illustrated by Rahele Jomepour Bell
  25. Tower of Life: How Yaffa Eliach Rebuilt Her Town in Stories and Photographs by Chana Stiefel, illustrated by Susan Gal 
  26. The Great Zapfino by Mac Barnett, illustrated by Marla Frazee 
  27. I Don’t Care by Julie Fogliano, illustrated by Molly Idle andJuana Martinez-Neal
  28. The World Belonged to Us by Jacqueline Woodson, illustrated by Leo Espinosa
  29. Little Good Wolf by Susan Stevens Crummel, illustrated by Janet Stevens
  30. The Circles in the Sky by Karl James Mountford
  31. Frances in the Country by Liz Garton Scanlon, illustrated by Sean Qualls 
  32. A Gift for Nana by Lane Smith
  33. Big and Small and In-Between by Carter Higgins, illustrated by Daniel Miyares 
  34. Snow Angel, Sand Angel by Lois-Ann Yamanaka, illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky
  35. Spring Parade by Camelia Kay, illustrated by Allyn Howard
  36. Action!: How Movies Began by Meghan McCarthy 

  37. A History of Me by Adrea Theodore, illustrated by Erin Robinson
  38. How to Say Hello to a Worm by Kari Percival
  39. Luli and the Language of Tea by Andrea Wang, illustrated by Hyewon Yum
  40. Somewhere in the Bayou by Jerome Pumphrey, illustrated by Jarrett Pumphrey
  41. Time to Fly by George Ella Lyon, illustrated by Stephanie Fizer Coleman
  42. Told and Retold: Around the World with Aesop’s Fables by Holly Berry
  43. Forever Home: A Dog and Boy Love Story by Henry Cole
  44. If You Find a Leaf by Aimee Sicuro
  45. The Digger and the Duckling by Joseph Kuefler

Good luck to all of us on picking the winners!

if you liked this post about our 2023 mock caldecott nominees, you might also like these other posts:

 

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