LQ2 - The Newbery Award

Background:
The Newbery Medal is given by the American Library Association each year to "the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children" (the contribution being from the previous year).

Frederic G. Melcher came up with the idea to honor children's authors and proposed his thoughts to the ALA in June of 1921. His formal proposal, which was officially accepted in 1922 as the first children's book award in the world, included the following goals:

"To encourage original creative work in the field of books for children. To emphasize to the public that contributions to the literature for children deserve similar recognition to poetry, plays, or novels. To give those librarians, who make it their life work to serve children's reading interests, an opportunity to encourage good writing in this field."

The Newbery Award

Rules and Criteria:
Other books from that year that were considered noteworthy are referred to as honor books, or previously, 'runners-up'.

In order to be eligible for an award, the author must be a citizen of the United States and have their work published in English in the U.S. in the year prior to the award.

All forms of writing, including fiction, non-fiction, and poetry should be considered for this award, obviously those of which were intended for a young audience. The audience is defined of people of 14 years of age and under.

The Newbery Seal

Because of carefully defined eligibility terms, each book will only be considered for an award once, the year depending on the publication, availability for purchase, and its copyright date.

The rules clearly specify that those who are considering a work for the award should not consider anything else about the author (whether or not they like other works from this author, whether or not this author has won a Newbery award before, etc.).

Those on the committee may look at the whole work by the author and consider its plot development, characters, theme, organization, setting, and its sense of appropriateness for the intended audience. However, not all of these categories must be deemed 'excellent' for a work to be nominated.

John Newbery (1713-1767):

Originally published in 1744

English publisher John Newbery was credited as being a first to publish books that were designed specifically for children.  He wanted to have resources available that were age-level appropriate and could be entertaining as well as educational.  He was best-known for his books, A Pretty Little Pocketbook and Little Goody Two-Shoes.

Information from ALA.org and Answers.com.

I'll do anything if you dare me to.

After reading the first 50 or so pages of this book, I have discovered my calling in life. I was meant to be a cat's-meat-man. At the time the book was written, the profession had died out because people had chosen to feed their pets table scraps. But that is no longer the case. Today, people spend tons of money on their pets. They pay for dog walkers, groomers, daycares, arthritis medication and even expensive surgeries. The way I figure it, the market is ready to support a cat's-meat-man. People already spend way too much money on food for their pets, so why wouldn't they pay me to stop by and feed their pets the best meat money can buy?

The (Latest) Stupid Thing I Did

The first two books from the Newbery list that I had looked very similar. So the other day I decided to take the History one back and accidentally took the Dolittle one back instead! How silly of me! I go to the library enough that I'm sure I can get it back soon. Either way is good! Talk to ya later, raccoon.

New Book

I started reading the new book. I figured we could both read the 1st part (the first 11 chapters or so...can't remeber and the book is ALL the way across the room!) if that sounds good to you. What do ya think?

Myron Set Free!

Goowy.com gives you a file storage account from box.net, so finally figured out how to link to the files stored on their server. Myron is much happier now, don't you think?

I got my book. I'll let you know when I start reading it. I have another one that is due today so I'm trying to finsih it up because I can't renew it any more times. If you are wanting to start yours, go for it. I'll only be a couple of days behind you.

Temporary Look

Since that uploading site must be gone for good, here is Myron with a dumb background until we can figure something else out. Poor Myron. He was so happy earlier, swimming in his sea of yellowness, and now he looks like he's caged in. Hopefully we will find a way to set him free.

Reading Response (from 5-27, just now posting it)

(So here is my response from last time I read. I am referring to some notes I took then but forming the written response as I go.

I have an idea. If we have random questions that come up while we are typing our responses or reading the book or whatever, go ahead and include them in your post, just as randomly as they come up. Label yours "JQ1" for "Julia's Question #1" and so forth, and I'll label mine LQ1...

One "question" can actually be a series of questions, that are just grouped together because they all kind of have to do with the same topic. Or, if you want, you can break them up into smaller pieces. Whatever you feel like.

Then if either of us feels like answering our own questions or the other person's questions, we can post answers to them at any point if we feel like Googling the information, researching it, asking around, or whatever. And be sure to put "JQ1" or whatever as labels for the post so Blogger can group all comments related to that topic together.

Just an idea. You don't have to do it if you don't want to! I probably will because I have nothing else going on in my life right now so I have plenty of time to waste! But it's cool if you don't)

The way this author writes is I think the most frustrating part about reading this book. He has a know-it-all attitude where he seems to think that he is doing society a huge favor by contributing his bits of wisdom into an easy-to-read format. Really, it's just annoying because his writing style lacks a professionalism which makes you question the credibility of what he is saying. There's got to be a better way to write a non-fiction book for kids without sounding tacky!

Van Loon seems very sold on anything Darwin ever had to say. He presents evolution as a simple fact and you can also tell he believes strongly in the "survival of the fittest" principle as he seems to reinforce it as he explains why certain civilizations lasted over others. It's a valid principle I think when you are looking at the big picture of the history of man I suppose, but I don't think human life can be as simplified as he tends to make it.

LQ1
When did Darwin first publish his ideas and theories? Was his "survival of the fittest" observation published along with his evolution ideas? Were these popular in the day of Van Loon? Pretty widely-accepted or not? Was there in general a more conservative, Biblically-based view on world beginnings in the 20s? I'm guessing Van Loon's book was thought well-enough of to have an award (the very first of the award, no less) given to him. I'm surprised it was not more of a controversial subject at the time. Anything published on this?

I'm very amused at the beginning of the book how he glides over the creation of man as developed from a cell. I've always thought that evolution sounded a little silly, but how much sillier it sounds when you have to strip away all of the technical science terms! A cell all of the sudden appears (we are not to ask where from or how it got there or why it came when it did), and after millions of years of drifting, somehow forms into a man-like creature, who is of course our very ancestor! I love it.

I think the thing I have been most disgruntled by so far is the picture entitled "The Indo-European or Aryan Races and Their Neighbors" on page 46 in my book. I am shocked at the way he has decided to color-code this. Well I guess not color. Pattern-code. Every group has its nice little cute pattern for its corresponding region, and then look what is "blacked" out - Africa. Of little importance or concern I guess. I find it very interesting that some of Africa is in the "History of Man" - parts near the Mediterranean and Egypt with the Nile would of course not be blacked out with the rest - these are much too important and if we are going to segregate, at least let us claim the well-developed parts of Africa that are well-known for the pyramids and other famous historical accomplishments!

I think Van Loon must be somehow saying, "The blacked-out region is for a completely different history book, which I would entitle, The Story of Another Mankind (That is not fully 'Mankind' but more of a Sub-Human Race)".

Notice how Australia is also blacked out. The same pattern-code for a completely different region. Is this because there are Aborigines there? I'm not sure I understand his line of thinking...

Words I've learned so far:
sexton - person who looks after a church
venerable - enticed to respect on account of character or age
dissensions - differences of opinion

Other questions I've had:

LQ2
Who was John Newbery? Why is there an award named after him? Who chose to give the award to Van Loon? More history on the ALA? Is it a voting process every year? How exactly is one nominated and what kinds of requirements must an author meet to be eligible for this award? I wonder if they receive anything, or if it's just the title itself.

LQ3
Who was this Van Loon guy? What other things was he known for? He seems to have been known for his historical works for children. I wonder if they actually used these as sort of a textbook-type resource in that time?

LQ4
What was children's literature like in the 20s? What about 1922 specifically? Was it pretty common for non-fiction books to be popular? Did children use libraries quite often then, or were books more of something they received as a special gift or possibly only used in school?

So I took a picture of my shirt and used Photoshop to crop the seahorse from it. Felt like making a color scheme based off of it for the blog but it can change today or tomorrow or whenever we feel like it. I was just bored and felt like playing around with it today. I'm not even sure if this is the right color yellow for you - maybe it has a tad more orange color to it than you usually would pick?

The Challenges of Exercising the Human Mind with Complex Literary Studies

Yessss-a!

It's pretty much crayon yellow, but we may need to add some purple and green argyle to it. I think then we'll pretty much be in business. So I'm slacking on the whole reading the book thing... I'll get back to that today. See you soon, racoon.

the look

Hey I made this yellow for you but I don't know if it's quite the right Julia-Yellow. I was too lazy to look up any hex codes so I just used sort of what they had. And other than that I centered the title because it looked dumb over to the left and then got tired of messing with it. So if you feel like playing with the code - have at it! Maybe we'll just change and add to it every time we post, haha. Doesn't matter to me - eventually I was probably going to make the settings such that you couldn't search for it through Google or Blogger, since it's really just for you and me. Welp, talk to ya later : ) Have a happy Memorial Day - are you doing anything cool? Is the library open? Do the kids still have a few days left of school or are they done?

tentative goal/first book

so maybe we will read all the newbery books ever or maybe not. we'll just see. and they have a copy at the acu library it looks like, along with other abilene places, but i checked and there is 1 in the acu library. alright i gotta go to the dinner my dad is having. talk to you later, crocodile :)