Some people love Spring, some Summer. Others love days like Valentines Day or Halloween. I know some people who are mad about horse racing season, TV award show time or sales after Thanksgiving.

For me, the absolute, hands-down most exciting time of the school year is the 8 weeks leading up to the ALA award season. For the uninitiated, that is the American Library Association and their awards are given on February 2nd 2015 next time around.

As an Elementary Librarian, my two favorite awards are for the Newbery, and the Caldecott Medal and there is plenty of excitement being generated about them already at sites like these.

Horn Book’s Calling Caldecott is my go-to place for reading about who is on the ‘maybe’ list…
I just did a lot of book-buying on our library kindles here, after seeing this great list from Goodreads.

After viewing this lovely slideshow declaring winners of the New York Times Best Illustrated Books, I was very interested in Travis Jonker’s informative post breaking down the ratio of how books fare on New York Times Lists vs Caldecott. Below are some of Travis’ observations. You can see why I like following him so much, he is always very informative.

• There has been only one year (2012) where none of the books on the Best Illustrated list won a Caldecott Honor or Medal. So 90% of the time at least one of the Best Illustrated books has won a Caldecott Honor or Medal.
• On average 1.5 books on the Best Illustrated list each year go on to win a Caldecott Honor or Medal.
• Seven times out of 10 a book on the Best Illustrated list has gone on to win the Caldecott Medal. Yes, 70% of the time a book on the Best Illustrated list has won the gold in the last decade. That’s an impressive figure.
• The best illustrated list contains the Caldecott Medal winner almost as much as it contains Caldecott Honor winners, with a total of seven Caldecott Medal books and eight Caldecott Honor books.

I was thrilled to see The Promise written by Nicola Davies @nicolakidsbooks and illustrated by Laura Carlin on the NYT list, but don’t think it is eligible for Caldecott…happy to hear differently from anyone out there.