What is the Georgia Children's Book Award program?

The Georgia Children's Book Awards are sponsored each year by the University of Georgia's Language and Literacy Education Department. A professor in the department puts together a committee of teachers and librarians who will look for their favorite books for children published within the last few years. They put together a list of 20 picture books and 20 chapter books. It's a lot of reading!

The lists are posted on the website for the awards program and at that point, students around the state of Georgia begin reading the books. If a student reads or listens to 3 of the books, he or she can vote in the spring for their favorite. The winners are announced at the end of the school year.

What's really exciting is that sometimes the winners actually come to Athens to pick up their awards and talk to teachers and librarians at the Georgia Children's Literature Conference. This is super-exciting - it's how I got to have dinner with Mo Willems, who wrote and illustrated Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. He really is hilarious.

The books on the list are also used for the Georgia Helen Ruffin Reading Bowl. Once the BHL team is finished with competition, the books on the list will be available to everybody once again to check out. Here's the link to this year's list: http://www.coe.uga.edu/gcba/pdf/09-10-bookaward-nominees.pdf.