Bank Street College Children's Library

The Irma Simonton Black and James H. Black Award for Excellence in Children's Literature

The procedures for the Irma Simonton Black and James H. Black Book Award are as follows. This award is given to a picture book for children in the first through third grades that best exemplifies excellence of text and illustration. Not only, therefore, must the older children who are selecting the finalists for the award enjoy the story, but they must feel that the illustrations support both the mood and the plot of the story as well. "Pretty pictures" are not enough to make for a winner. The older children must remember also that the final judges will be 7 and 8-year-olds here at Bank Street, and first, second and third graders in several other schools.

A set of four or five books selected by a committee of adult readers is delivered to each 8-9s and 9-10s classroom. During the course of the week the children may read, hear, look at, discuss, etc. these books. Teachers may choose to read some of the longer books to the group. Others the children may choose to examine themselves. At the end of the week, the children receive a ballot on which they select one or two (but no more than two) books that they really feel are excellent. After the voting is completed, a new set of books is presented and the same procedure is followed. There are four sets in all.

The first week of March, the children's librarian, who is the director of the award, meets with each whole class group for about an hour. By that time the process will have narrowed the finalists down to between 10 and 12 books. As a group, the children will review, discuss and compare each of the books, and at the end of the hour they will be asked to vote one last time on the 3 titles they wish to send on to the final judges.

The three (or in case of a close vote, four) top titles are then sent on to each of the cooperating schools or classrooms. Cooperating teachers and librarians receive the following instructions:

Read the books to your class at the usual read-aloud time. Read only one book at a time. You may want to stretch one of the longer books over more than one day.
Carry on your usual method of commenting on or reacting to the story. We'd like this to be as natural a part of your day as possible; you don't need to elicit responses if the children don't usually make them, at least the first time around.
Leave the books where they can be available to the children for looking, poring over, or trying to read.
Please read the books more than once. After the second reading, you might want to ask questions about the children's feelings about the book, what parts they like or don't like, whether they'd like to have the same experiences the protagonist had, or any questions that might clue you in to their reactions.

At the end of the four week period, and no later that the first week in April, the children in the cooperating classrooms are asked to vote for the book that they feel most deserves the Irma S. and James H. Black book award. They may vote for only one book. Cooperating teachers submit the total number of votes that each book received, the votes are added, and the book with the greatest number of votes is declared the winner.