The Kids Vote

Thursday, December 23rd, the last of our kids cast their ballots in the Mock Caldecott Election. The last couple of weeks before our vacation were a whirlwind of activity. Trying to make sure every class had read all the books was challenging enough, but student absences made getting full participation tricky. Every morning I ran around before school with a list of students who had been absent the day their class voted. I was able to round up more than half of the missing students this way.

Well, the voting is in and here are the results:

We had 395 students from grades PreK-1 cast their ballots.

Our selections were:

	Title	Illustrator	author	Number of votes
Medal Winner	Art and Max	David Wiesner	David Wiesner	90
Honors	City Dog, Country Frog	Jon Muth	Mo Willems	49
	Push Putton	Aliki	Aliki	41
	Children Make Terrible Pets	Peter Brown	Peter Brown	35
	Bear in the Air	Amy Bates	Susan Meyers	32

At the end of the day, I asked to have the results be announced along with the Caught Being Good announcement. I can’t tell you  what the reaction was elsewhere in the building, but the class that was in the library let out a cheer.

It was a great feeling to come to the end, but it was also sad. I can only imagine how members of the Caldecott Committee feel once the decision has been made and the phone calls made to inform the winners.

What is left for us is awaiting the announcements on January 10^th and discussing our thoughts about the process.