Children's Book Council of Australia Winners for 2014

Friday 12 noon we all held our breath and crossed our fingers across my school as we waited to hear the 2014 CBCA winners.  It was exciting to hear the cheers as one of our favourites The Swap won the Picture book Early Childhood award.

In the days preceding the big announcement our classes had voted and The Swap was a resounding winner for our Grade One and Two students.  We were also pleased about Banjo and Ruby Red, an honour book in this same section.

Only a small handful of students have read the Younger Readers category winner A Very Unusual Pursuit. It can be difficult to tackle a long novel in our short library sessions but I enjoyed this one so much - it clearly stood out as a winner from the other short listed titles in this section. Our classes will enjoy extracts this week and we will purchase a small set for use with reading circles.

I told the whole school to listen for my screams if Silver Buttons didn't win! It didn't! But I held in my screams because this magical book did receive an honour in the Picture Book of the Year category.  The winner for this important section was Rules of Summer by Shaun Tan.  This is a book that needs to be read and then re-read.  You might like to compare Rules of Summer with the short stories in Tales from Outer Suburbia and the illustrations in What Miscellaneous abnormality is that? : a field guide. In fact looking at the whole body of work from Shaun Tan should allow you to make connections within and between his intriguing books.

Here is an excellent review of The Rules of Summer.  This one from Kirkus is also fabulous. Shaun Tan himself has several very informative and generous videos on his web site.  Shaun says :

... there are about 25 of these paintings,…together they form almost like a map of a particular kind of childhood experience which centres around the activities of these two boys, it’s a relationship that is both very friendly and caring but also antagonistic and towards the end of the book begins to disintegrate before finding some kind of redemption and coming together again. 

Here are some excellent teaching notes.

The slogan for Children's Book Week in Australia this year is 'Connect to Reading'.  We have a huge week of happenings planned including special lunch activities every day and creative thinking challenges for our Grade 3-6 students based around this slogan.   You can review all the winners and honour books here.