SLJ Kicks Off the Second Battle of the Kids' Books Tournament
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By Debra Lau Whelan -- School Library Journal, 03/10/2010
Are you ready to rumble again? Then get involved in SLJ’s second annual Battle of the Kids’ Books, and let your students have fun with 15 star-studded judges as they cast their votes for last year’s best books for young people.
The contest, which kicks off on Monday, March 15, is a competition among 16 of the very best tween and teen titles published in 2009 and is judged by some of the biggest names in children’s books—like M. T. Anderson, Megan Whalen Turner, and Walter Dean Myers.
One of the four brackets in the first elimination round has Jim Murphy deciding between Deborah Heiligman’s Charles and Emma (Holt) and Phillip Hoose’s Claudette Colvin (Farrar/Melanie Kroupa Bks.), and Nancy Farmer choosing between Jacqueline Kelly’s The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate (Holt) and Kristin Cashore’s Fire (Dial). There’s something for everyone, including books by Shaun Tan, Jacqueline Woodson, and Rebecca Stead. (For a complete list of judges and books, visit sljbattleofthebooks.com.)
For the first time, students and others get to resurrect a previously eliminated book by voting in an Undead Poll to compete in the final round. But don’t dawdle, voting ends Sunday, March 14. On Monday, April 5, at the end of three weeks, Katherine Paterson, the nation’s Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, will select the grand prize winner.
Betsy Bird, a children’s librarian with the New York Public Library and an SLJ blogger, posted an entertaining YouTube video that explains this year’s contest and talks about last year’s winner, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games (Scholastic, 2008).
Schools and libraries around the country are already getting in on the fun. The kids at Greenwich Country Day School in Connecticut, for example, will closely follow this year’s contest as they did last year.
Mary Clark, the school’s director of library and information services, created a laminated poster-size version of the brackets and taped it to the wall of her library’s entrance. Color copies of book covers appear next to their corresponding titles in the first bracket, and as each round progresses and a title gets knocked out, the book cover is taken down, explains Clark.
“Beneath the poster is a table displaying all the books, but even when we had multiple copies, the table display quickly disappeared as students checked out the battling books,” Clark explains. “Battle of the Kids’ Books is an observation sport for the students here, but they watch with interest and take a new or renewed interest in the books.”
Eric Carpenter, a second-grade teacher and blogger in Atlanta, is running a bracket contest on his blog that allows participants to accumulate points for each correct match-up. Correct predictions in the first round will earn one point each, second-round matches are worth two points, and third-round matches are worth four points. The championship round is worth eight points and predicting the Undead winner is worth five points. Guessing all correct answers totals 37 points.
“At the end of each round of matches I will tally up the points and post the top scores,” Carpenter says.
PZ Myers, a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota in Morris, blogged about Battle of the Kids’ Books, urging participants to vote for the two science books—Pamela S. Turner’s The Frog Scientist (Houghton) and Charles and Emma—among those competing.
SLJ’s Battle of the Kids’ Books is the brainchild of three educators: Monica Edinger and Roxanne Feldman of the Dalton School in New York City and Jonathan Hunt of the Modesto City Schools in California. The competition was inspired by the Morning News’ Tournament of Books, an annual competition featuring the previous year’s best novels for adults.
