Giving Thanks to Our Community

November 23, 2020 by Erika Thulin Dawes Leave a Comment

This week, we wish for all of you: safety, health, connection, and comfort.

We are deeply grateful for all the work you do each and every day to put wonderful books in the hands, minds, and hearts of young people.

We will return with a typical entry next week and have some announcements to share:

The winners of the 2021 Charlotte Huck Award for Outstanding Fiction for Children and the Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children were announced this past Saturday at the virtual National Council of Teachers of English Convention. Denise served as chair for the Orbis Pictus awards and Grace, Mary Ann, Katie, and Erika presented a session based on our work at The Classroom Bookshelf. We have blogged about three of the winners. See our entries for: I Am Every Good Thing by Derrick Barnes, illustrated by Gordon C. James; The Teachers March written by Sandra and Neil Wallace, Illustrated by Charly Palmer; and We Are the Water Protectors by Carole Lindstrom, illustrated by Michaela Goode. This year’s award announcements also included NCTE’s Notable Poetry Books and Verse Novels Listing along with recognition of Janet S. Wong with the Excellence in Poetry for Children award. We are grateful to the committee members who read tirelessly to bring us these wonderful lists of award winning books!

The fall marks the launch of a collection of new resources for teachers, sponsored by NCTE’s Children’s Literature Assembly: The Biography Clearinghouse. The Biography Clearinghouse is designed to support teachers to explore the classroom possibilities of powerfully written biographies for children and young adults. The site includes lesson ideas, videos with the biography creators, and curated resources to support teaching with biography across the content areas. Mary Ann has been leading this new initiative and Erika is a founding member. You can hear Mary Ann and Xenia Hadijoannou describe this project in an upcoming webinar that features authors Lesa Cline-Ransome, Carole Boston Weatherford, Tonya Lee Stone and Barbara Rosenstock. This session, Real People, Real Classrooms: Introducing The BIography Clearinghouse is free with advance registration on December 9 from 6-7pm ET.

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Filed under: Announcements, Awards

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About Erika Thulin Dawes

Erika is a professor of language and literacy at Lesley University. A former classroom teacher, reading specialist, and literacy supervisor, she now teaches courses in children’s literature, early literacy, and literacy methods. Erika is the co-author of Learning to Write with Purpose, Teaching with Text Sets, and Teaching to Complexity.