The Watermelon Seed by Greg Pizzoli (author and illustrator).This award is given to “to the author(s) and illustrator(s) of the most distinguished American book for beginning readers published in English in the United States during the preceding year.”.Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass by Meg Medina.This award is given to “to a Latino/Latina writer and illustrator whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of literature for children and youth.”. Mister Orange by TruusMatti, translated by Laura Watkinson.This award is “given to the most outstanding children’s book originally published in a language other than English in a country other than the United States, and subsequently translated into English for publication in the United States.”.This award is given to “an author or illustrator for a book that embodies an artistic expression of the disability experience for child and adolescent audiences.”.Knock Knock: My Dad’s Dream for Me illustrated by Bryan Collier (written by Daniel Beaty).This award “to outstanding African American authors and illustrators of books for children and young adults that demonstrate an appreciation of African American culture and universal human values.”.Locomotive by Brian Floca (author and illustrator).This award is given “to the artist of the most distinguished American picture book for children.”.Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures by Kate DiCamillo.This award is given “to the author for the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children.”.A Splash of Red: The Life and Art of Horace Pippin by Jan Bryant, illustrated by Melissa Sweet.This award “recogniz excellence in nonfiction writing for children.”.An optimistic outdoor holiday adventure, functional families, simple language and a happy ending are still worthwhile for contemporary younger readers.Children’s Book Award Winners, 2014 By Donna Bulatowicz Recognising that the movement toward prizing realist, trauma-based texts may not serve younger readers allowed me to justify alternate solid ground for excellence in positioning the themes, characters, settings, language and plot in Time Squad closer to my original creative vision, better meeting 8 to 12-year-olds on their development curve. A trend toward prizing issues-based literature has developed which may explain the initial pressure I felt as a writer to move away from my creative vision for Time Squad. This was predominantly caused by a traumatic reality which set too high a listening comprehension (LC) factor for Gough and Tunmer, and in Piaget’s terms, required a higher stage of development than the concrete operational younger reader. Applying this developmental framework to five years of winning books from the peak children’s literature awards of the Newbery Medal (USA), Carnegie Medal (UK) and Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year, the analysis concludes that eight out of 15 awardwinning novels did not meet younger readers on their development curve. What qualifies as excellent children’s literature for younger readers today? And, are younger readers well served by that standard? This exegesis uses the work of developmental psychologist Jean Piaget and Gough and Tunmer (The Simple View of Reading) to create an understanding of younger readers’ systems of thought, modes of cognition, decoding skills and life experience. This led me to ask two questions in my critical paper ‘Putting the Child back into Children’s Literature’. At some level, I seemed to believe that writing well for contemporary children needed to involve serious life issues. However, I found issues such as divorce, family conflicts and financial difficulties emerging as I wrote, pushing my optimistic adventure novel into domestic issues-based territory. The book is designed as the first in a light-hearted optimistic holiday adventure series written for emerging readers and pursuing themes of the environment, Australian identity, what it means to be an Australian girl, our history – both personal and national – and the ghosts who speak to us from it. In fulfilling the quest they solve a series of century-old puzzles and challenges and finally reveal the full magic of the old house. Tiggy and her new neighbour Hamish discover the ghost of the original owner, Sir Harry Barnard, has set them a quest. It tells the story of an 11-year-old girl, Tiggy, who moves to Brisbane after her mother inherits the family’s overgrown ‘ancestral home’. The creative project for my Master of Philosophy Creative Writing was conceived as a time-slip fantasy for 8 to 12-year-old readers with the working title Time Squad.
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