Darn you, Charlotte Zolotow committee! You beat me to the punch, awarding this fine book your award last week! The CCBC website explains, “The Charlotte Zolotow Award is given annually to the author of the best picture book text published in the United States in the preceding year….The award is administered by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, a children’s literature library of the School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Each year a committee of children’s literature experts selects the winner from the books published in the preceding year. The winner is announced in January each year. A bronze medallion is formally presented to the winning author in the spring during an annual public event that honors the career of Charlotte Zolotow.” If you have never attended the Zolotow celebration, you are really missing out. First, you get to go to Madison, Wisconsin, and second, you get to be with people who love children’s books, and third, the lectures are always terrific.
So, this lovely book won an award for the text. Do the illustrations hold up as well as the words?
If you have not read Each Kindness, please do. I just gave a talk to 80 or so second graders at a local school and this (along with Island) was the book they appreciated the most. This school does a fantastic Caldecott exploration each year, and by the time I drag in with my little dog-and-pony show, they have some strong opinions about current picture books. I get to tell the story of how I got to be on the committee…blah blah…but then I get to sneak in a few questions about what they are liking and not liking. When I held up Woodson’s book, there was a collective intake of breath and a murmur of oohs and ahhs.
Second/third grade might be the perfect age for this one. Somewhere around this time, kids start to notice things like clothing and wealth and what makes kids fit in or not. These are the same grades where teachers find themselves reaching for The One Hundred Dresses, a book which deals with a similar theme.
Let’s look at the art, shall we? Lewis’s watercolors never disappoint, do they? The first spread is a lovely school shot– rural school, snow-covered. A lone child walks up the front steps. Turn the page and Lewis captures the perfect feel of a New Kid. Maya’s eyes are cast down, the teacher is holding her hand, and the perspective lets us know that she is not comfortable. Her clothes reflect the text–her clothes look a tad ragged, especially for the first day. Turn the page and we see the other main character, the narrator Chloe, looking out the window at the reader, a sour look on her face. Maya is faded in the background, but she has a little smile, a little hope on her face. The playground page is almost too painful to look at–three little girls, holding hands, while Maya walks with her hands behind her back. Lewis puts a bit of sunlight around the girls and has the rest of the group looking at Maya. No one is including her.
The art goes on, gently documenting the social strata of this classroom. Chloe rejects Maya and sets the tone for the rest of the class. The seasons change, Maya keeps trying to fit in, but Chloe and her friends do not allow it. We see her in her fancy (but used) dress and shoes or holding the wrong doll and her eyes always remind us of her pain. Even while she skips rope, she skips alone.
The story and illustrations change once the teacher (finally, I say) gets involved. Maya is absent when the teacher presents a lesson on kindness that finally gets through to Chloe. We see the faces reflected in the ripples of the bowl of water–a nice change of perspective. The art now highlights Chloe. First, her somber face stares at that stone that stands in for the idea of kindness. Then, her eyes are cast down (like Maya’s) on her way home, slowly walking how from the school with the backpack seeming to drag her down. The next page is the only dark page in the book–Maya’s empty desk which will stay empty. The last two pages let us know the truth–that Chloe will never get a chance to make it better. Chloe looks sad and sorry, her body slightly slumped as she contemplates what has happened. She becomes smaller on that final page turn, less powerful, but with a hopeful shaft of light pointing to the future.
This is a true teacher’s book–with plenty to talk about in a classroom. Will the committee find it too teacher-y or a new classic in the literature of bullying and kindness?
What say you?
The post Each Kindness appeared first on The Horn Book.
Darn you, Charlotte Zolotow committee! You beat me to the punch, awarding this fine book your award last week! The CCBC website explains, “The Charlotte Zolotow Award is given annually to the author of the best picture book text published in the United States in the preceding year….The award is administered by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, a children’s literature library of the School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Each year a committee of children’s literature experts selects the winner from the books published in the preceding year. The winner is announced in January each year. A bronze medallion is formally presented to the winning author in the spring during an annual public event that honors the career of Charlotte Zolotow.” If you have never attended the Zolotow celebration, you are really missing out. First, you get to go to Madison, Wisconsin, and second, you get to be with people who love children’s books, and third, the lectures are always terrific.
So, this lovely book won an award for the text. Do the illustrations hold up as well as the words?
If you have not read Each Kindness, please do. I just gave a talk to 80 or so second graders at a local school and this (along with Island) was the book they appreciated the most. This school does a fantastic Caldecott exploration each year, and by the time I drag in with my little dog-and-pony show, they have some strong opinions about current picture books. I get to tell the story of how I got to be on the committee…blah blah…but then I get to sneak in a few questions about what they are liking and not liking. When I held up Woodson’s book, there was a collective intake of breath and a murmur of oohs and ahhs.
Second/third grade might be the perfect age for this one. Somewhere around this time, kids start to notice things like clothing and wealth and what makes kids fit in or not. These are the same grades where teachers find themselves reaching for The One Hundred Dresses, a book which deals with a similar theme.
Let’s look at the art, shall we? Lewis’s watercolors never disappoint, do they? The first spread is a lovely school shot– rural school, snow-covered. A lone child walks up the front steps. Turn the page and Lewis captures the perfect feel of a New Kid. Maya’s eyes are cast down, the teacher is holding her hand, and the perspective lets us know that she is not comfortable. Her clothes reflect the text–her clothes look a tad ragged, especially for the first day. Turn the page and we see the other main character, the narrator Chloe, looking out the window at the reader, a sour look on her face. Maya is faded in the background, but she has a little smile, a little hope on her face. The playground page is almost too painful to look at–three little girls, holding hands, while Maya walks with her hands behind her back. Lewis puts a bit of sunlight around the girls and has the rest of the group looking at Maya. No one is including her.
The art goes on, gently documenting the social strata of this classroom. Chloe rejects Maya and sets the tone for the rest of the class. The seasons change, Maya keeps trying to fit in, but Chloe and her friends do not allow it. We see her in her fancy (but used) dress and shoes or holding the wrong doll and her eyes always remind us of her pain. Even while she skips rope, she skips alone.
The story and illustrations change once the teacher (finally, I say) gets involved. Maya is absent when the teacher presents a lesson on kindness that finally gets through to Chloe. We see the faces reflected in the ripples of the bowl of water–a nice change of perspective. The art now highlights Chloe. First, her somber face stares at that stone that stands in for the idea of kindness. Then, her eyes are cast down (like Maya’s) on her way home, slowly walking how from the school with the backpack seeming to drag her down. The next page is the only dark page in the book–Maya’s empty desk which will stay empty. The last two pages let us know the truth–that Chloe will never get a chance to make it better. Chloe looks sad and sorry, her body slightly slumped as she contemplates what has happened. She becomes smaller on that final page turn, less powerful, but with a hopeful shaft of light pointing to the future.
This is a true teacher’s book–with plenty to talk about in a classroom. Will the committee find it too teacher-y or a new classic in the literature of bullying and kindness?
What say you?
The post Each Kindness appeared first on The Horn Book.
Illustrated by E.B. Lewis
$16.99, ages 5-8, 32 pages
A school girl is overcome by regret when she loses her chance to apologize to a classmate she was mean to, in this extraordinary picture book.
Told from the perspective of a child who bullies, the story reveals how painful it can be to hurt someone and how paralyzing it is when you can no longer say you're sorry.
Acclaimed author Jacqueline Woodson draws from a time when she was unkind and also shows that at some point everyone behaves badly and must face the ugliness inside of them.
When a new girl named Maya starts school, Chloe refuses to even return her smile. The girl's clothes are ragged and the class ignores her, so Chloe does too. She scoots her desk away from Maya to try to separate herself.
As the days go by, Chloe's cool reserve grows into disdain, as she and her two close friends whisper secrets behind Maya's back, and make fun of her clothes and lunch. Maya must hear what they say, yet she is kind and tries to win them over.
Day after day Maya comes up to the girls, holds out what she brought to school to share (a set of jacks, pick-up sticks or a tattered doll) and asks if they will play with her. And each time, the girls refuse and stay locked in their ugly moods.
They put on airs and seem to take delight in hurting her. At one point, a cool satisfied look comes over their faces as they follow Maya walking away from them. Maya's brow is now creased with sadness and readers' hearts sink too.
Then one day, Maya doesn't come to school and Chloe's teacher gives a lesson about kindness. Ms. Albert has her class gather around a big bowl of water, and she drops in a stone and talks about how the waves ripple out.
"This is what kindness does," she tells them. "Each little thing we do goes out, like a ripple, into the world." Afterward, Ms. Albert asks each student to drop in a stone and share what nice things they've done -- only Chloe can't think of any.
It is a pivotal moment and illustrator E. B. Lewis angles down on Chloe from above. He's whited out the background to put readers' focus on Chloe, who now stares down ashamedly at the stone.
Suddenly it's as if all of Chloe's mean behavior rushes back to her and she can think of little else but how to make things better with Maya. But where is Maya? She's still not come back to school.
"Each morning, I walked to school slowly, hoping this would be the day Maya returned and she'd look at me and smile," Chloe says. "I promised myself this would be the day I smile back."
But the opportunity never comes and one day, Ms. Albert announces that Maya's family has moved away and Chloe's throat fills with all the things she wished she would have said to her.
That afternoon, Chloe walks home alone, her eyes cast down to the ground. On the way, she stops at a pond, squats down on the bank and begins tossing in small stones over and over, and watches how the ripples go out and way.
"Like each kindness -- done and not done," Woodson writes. "Like every girl somewhere -- holding a small gift out to someone and that someone turning away from it." And Chloe realizes her chance to be kind to Maya "is becoming more and more forever gone."
Chloe's painful, yet empowering story shows readers not only how awful it feels to be unkind, but how important is to be nice as much as they can. Chloe's pain of being mean is compounded by her inability to say she's sorry.
The book also enlightens like few others have, by showing that bullying can come from anyone, even from kids who try to be good. As Woodson put it in an interview, the capacity to hurt others "exists in all of us."
"I think it's easier for the world to say, 'That person is a bully and THAT person is being bullied,'" she continued. "But the truth is, it's much more complicated than that and until we can each take an internal look, we're not going to understand the enormity of…of anything."
Celebrated illustrator Lewis, who collaborated with Woodson on two other award-winning books, does a masterful job at echoing Woodson's words. He seems to have an intuitive sense of how to express deeply felt emotion and bares everything the characters are feeling in his watercolors.
As a result, characters' emotions seem to sizzle on the page and readers may feel as if they're also welling up inside of them.
This is a brilliantly handled book that explores bullying without being judgmental -- and then inspires readers to be brave, own up to their mistakes, and always try, every day, to do something nice for someone else.
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