"Caldecott Kids"

The Caldecott "sweepstakes" is over for another year. Those of us who involve ourselves in this annual exercise are either nodding smugly or shaking our heads in puzzlement. This is the moment, at the very beginning of 2003, to think about the 2004 award in a new way…to engage in the process with a different sight… through the eyes of its real audience, as Frederic Melcher himself intended.

The Caldecott Committee Manual defines a picture book as, among other things, a book that "displays respect for children's understandings, abilities, and appreciations." We know that Melcher, in his 1921 speech to the Children's Librarians' Section of the American Library Association, gave the mandate: Children's Librarians "…knew the audience of boys and girls, knew them intimately, knew what boys and girls really wanted. They could help build a greater literature by giving authoritative recognition to those who wrote [and illustrated] well." From this speech came Melcher's concept of an award for distinguished American children's books.

Like all Newbery and Caldecott Award committees since then, the 2002 Caldecott Committee took Melcher's intent and his designation of children's librarians as authorities on children seriously. We at the Perrot Library take it to mean that the Caldecott selection process is more than an elitist intellectual exercise performed in a vacuum. It is always intended to have children's understandings, abilities, and appreciations at its heart. Because of this, we designed a program that would involve children in that thrilling process. It was an opportunity to see firsthand how the intended audience reacted to the wide variety of picture books published in a given year (in this case 2001), and to implement a new type of program for the library. The program was more work than we ever anticipated, but the rewards were enormous. By its conclusion, we realized that the children had grown to understand what David Macaulay meant in his 1991 Caldecott acceptance speech for Black and White (Houghton, 1990) —that "it is essential to see, not merely to look."

Our goals were to teach children how to read pictures and to include their voices in the evaluation process, not merely to have a contest for the most popular picture book of the year. To that end, we planned an ambitious ongoing program called "SPOTLIGHT! On the Caldecott," listed in our promotional flyers as a learning-to-look experience that would introduce participants to art language, media, style, personal interpretation, and method. It proved so successful that we plan to include it in our regular rotation of school-age programs, and we encourage others to replicate it in schools and libraries.

Our first decision was to invite interested second- and third-grade applicants to a kind of "interview." These children would form our Caldecott Kids group, which met one hour a week from July through December 2001. Children were asked to bring their favorite Caldecott books to the "interviews" and to sit down and talk with us individually. We asked them to explain their choices and to show us a favorite illustration. We emphasized that there were no wrong or right responses. What we discovered surprised and gratified us. First, both the children and their parents took the process seriously. Families obtained lists of Caldecott Award-winning books, and they examined and talked about the books together. Second, children were surprisingly knowledgeable and articulate about picture-book art. They didn't always have the vocabulary, but they already showed a skill in reading pictures, in identifying the feeling each illustrator was trying to evoke. The children's eagerness and earnestness only intensified over the course of the program.

The summer before the award winners were chosen, we studied the elements of art with our Caldecott Kids. We based our discussions on Molly Bang's Picture This: How Pictures Work (SeaStar, 2000), concentrating primarily on the first section of the book, entitled "Building a Picture." Each hour-long meeting contained four elements. First we replicated Bang's use of basic abstract shapes and colors to tell the familiar story, in pictures, of "Little Red Riding Hood." (Although Bang advocates the use of her book with older children who can learn through cutting their own shapes, we used an easel and large poster-board cutouts for demonstration.) Bang explains how images work to tell a story that touches the reader's emotions—to make the reader feel. Second, we read a picture-book variant of "Little Red Riding Hood" so that children got an idea of how each illustrator told the story through pictures, and of how individual style dictates the decisions made by illustrators. Third, we selected and examined a well-reviewed 2001 picture book that successfully demonstrated the visual element we had discussed. We approached this book from many angles, sharing only the words, looking at only the pictures, and then examining words and pictures together. Finally, the children got up to their elbows in art materials. We decided to give the kids a chance to experience as many different kinds of media as possible, each child creating a cumulative Caldecott sketchbook/scrapbook. Each week we focused on one medium that had some connection to the books and artists being considered. For example, when we looked at Marc Simont's The Stray Dog (HarperCollins, 2001), the children worked with watercolors, and A Poke in the I (Candlewick, 2001), a collection of concrete poems selected by Paul B. Janeczko and illustrated by Chris Raschka, inspired some pretty wonderful torn-paper collage. In addition to giving children maximum appreciation of the skill involved, the exercise also gave them a better understanding of the Caldecott criteria, "Excellence of execution in the artistic technique employed." For the sketchbook, there was a set subject: a still life using basic shapes and bright colors—an orange pumpkin, a stack of books, copper mums, and a purple table cover. This allowed the children to observe the transforming effect when the same subject is expressed in various media. Each week, a new sketchbook page was created, including that week's artwork and peripheral materials (trivia questions, photographs, etc.). Just before Christmas, the library's Caldecott Kids gathered to make their choices. The children spoke easily and fluently about the feelings of tension and movement evoked by diagonal lines. They talked about the softness and safety evoked by round lines and shapes. They talked about the mood set by an artist's choice of color. They talked about the effects of using color or shape, drawing the eye to make visual associations. While the Caldecott Kids' choices were reasonably close to those of the actual committee, what is more important is that the youngsters had acquired what Rudolf Arnheim called in the foreword to the 1991 edition of Bang's Picture This , "a kind of grammar for the eyes."

What of the many Caldecott Committee members who have engaged the responses of children through the years? Their experiences doubtless prove what the prescient Melcher already knew: when children see , it is worthwhile for the rest of us to listen. Referring to The Three Pigs , the Caldecott Kids delighted, "All those white backgrounds! They are like blank pages—anything's possible!" And it is!