Welcome

This is the blog of children's book author and elementary school teacher, Stacy Barnett Mozer. I blog about my own writing journey, the journey of other kidlit authors, my classroom, and talk about books. Thanks for stopping by. Your thoughts are always welcome (and encouraged).

Monday, January 27, 2020

#IMWAYR #MockCaldecott January 27, 2020


 

Each week I try to join Jen from Teach Mentor Texts and Kellee from Unleashing Readers to share all of the reading I've done over the week from picture books to young adult novels. This week I ran a #MockCaldecott in my 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grade reading classrooms. While none of our top choices ended up winning the Caldecott, we were excited to see some of the books win other awards during the Youth Media Award announcements today.

Here are the 20 books we reviewed. 

The students and I read and rated all 20 and then debated their choices. Here were our top two favorites:


Here are a couple reasons why my students liked this book:


We were disappointed this book didn't win the Caldecott, but were thrilled it won the Pura Belpre Award. Here are some reasons why my students loved this book:


Congratulations to the 2020 medal and honor winners! We were so happy to have the opportunity to read all of these amazing books and they are all winners to us!







_______________


Stacy Barnett Mozer is a teacher and a middle grade author. If you like what she's been reading follow her on Goodreads. Please leave a comment below. 

Wednesday, January 1, 2020

Cybils 2019 Finalists Announced!

I was so honored to be part of the group of bloggers reading Middle Grade Fiction for the Cybils Children's and Young Adult Bloggers' Literary Award. There were so many amazing books nominated I wish we could have chosen more. I highly suggest viewing the whole list and reading them for yourself but we had to narrow it down to seven finalists. Here they are!


For more information about these books, visit the middle grade fiction page on the Cybils site

To see the finalists in other categories go here

Winners will be announced on February 14. I can't wait to see which book the next committee chooses. They have a very difficult job ahead of them, but lots of great reading!