This past Saturday was the spring meeting of the Young Hoosier Book Award Committee and we had such a great meeting that I'm all jazzed up to read, read, read this spring and summer!
I've posted about the basic mechanics of the YHBA committee before, but I think this year our middle grade group has gotten off to a particularly good start. We spent our Saturday meeting hashing out deadlines and expectations so that we can be sure to keep the lines of communication open and get all the necessary work done. In addition to reading and rating the nominated books (a list of 74 books this year), we're responsible for creating classroom resources for each title that makes it to our final list of nominees (20 books).
I'm sure I'm not the only one excited and part of that is because committee members had more ownership over the process this year. As a group, we decided what deadlines made sense and how we could realistically cut the workload while still making sure that everything gets done. This is also a banner year for nominations! Lots of nonfiction and newer titles have been nominated, many of which were already on my personal to-read list, so that makes tackling that list more fun. I'm also pleased to see a variety of nonfiction nominated since the Common Core standards emphasize literary nonfiction and a list with lots of nonfiction will doubtless be useful for many of our Indiana teachers.
ALSO, WE GOT THESE NOTEBOOKS:
I love having a notebook to dedicate to my YHBA notes and this year they gave us notebooks with the instructions for uploading work to our committee's Google Drive and it has covers of some of our nominated titles around the edges. I love it!
So here's to another season of YHBA reading! Let's go!