I know very little about the Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Book Award

[james_davis_nicoll]

Having just discovered that it existed at all today.

This prize recognizes authors and illustrators who demonstrate artistic excellence in Canadian children’s literature.

I am very intrigued by how they select the winners:

Winning books are selected by juries of children from a public school in Ontario (juries alternate yearly between one public school in Toronto and a public school outside Toronto).

Comments

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Hmm.

How are the children selected? I skipped school to hang out in the public library because my teachers gave me shit for reading in class.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Don't know so I asked them in email.

In the late 1970s, we were required to spend a half hour a day reading prose of our choice. No comics. It was a very briar patch situation for me.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The turning point for me was when I went to a school whose library was not organized by grade level. At my previous school, I had explicit permission to read books from the shelves for older kids, but I didn't want to because they were Not For Me.

(Also, I think they had a lot of mundane lives-of-preteens fiction that didn't appeal to me at all, whereas the second school had a lot of 1940s-60s vintage science books and science fiction, for some reason.)

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Waterloo Public Library tried to keep young people from the adult stacks but not every librarian enforced this. One learned who to keep an eye out for.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I went to a two room, four grade country school house. One small library per room. Read them both in the first couple of months of access. Thank goodness we had our own library.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

I don't think I've encountered this at a school library. As far as I can recall, all my school libraries just had the usual fiction vs nonfiction division (I don't think any had enough books to make shelving by genre divisions worth the trouble).

Public libraries, yes; I got my first 'adult' laminated library card when I wore out my cardstock-for-kids library card.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Clearly you were a much better person in a previous life than I was.

[comrade-cat.livejournal.com]

Things to add to the list of what to require once the high stakes testing theorists are up against the wall after the revolution.

Also, the demise of phonics (at least locally, it may be in place in other states) has led to an unconsidered annoyance in which masses of kids under 18 have no idea how to pronounce sf/f names. I mean, I have sympathy for readers who encounter !Xytroenii etc. and for non-native speakers, but everybody who says 'Ravnica' Rav-INN-ick-ah should be kicked. It's like nuke-you-lar, only the net difference in cool is astronomically higher.

I approve of this jury composition.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

The way the juries appear to work is thusly:

The local teacher-librarian is contacted by a representative from the Ontario Arts Council. A jury is selected using the sort of criteria you'd expect to be used for a book jury. There are currently two awards granted per year. One is judged by a jury of five grades 3 & 4 students, the other by five grades 7 & 8 students. Generally the split between boys and girls is as even as they can arrange (so either 3F/2M or 2F/3M) but this can be skewed by the demographics of the school supplying the jury (if, for example, the jury is drawn from an all-girl or all-boy school, it's going to be deficient in the sex not taught at the school).

Now, the two juries are not expected to generate their own list of nominees. That is done by adults who are selected from the community of children's literature specialists (but not people who work for publishers): librarians, writers (as long as they don't have a book eligible that year), teachers and so on. There are three people on each jury and each of them is expected to produce a list of five noteworthy, eligible books, drawing from their knowledge of what has been published that year.

[kldonnelly.livejournal.com]

My school had the same requirement. They called it "SSR" for Sustained Silent Reading. It was like having a double recess.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

SSR? Hah. OBVIOUSLY a commie plot...