My Caldecott challenge: Although these Caldecott winner and honor books are not, for the most part, books I’ve read aloud to my son, I still found them interesting. A few I had strong negative opinions of; they show that even books that earned the Caldecott award do become dated!
Prayer for a Child by Rachel Field, illustrated by Elizabeth Orton Jones, is self-explanatory: it is a rhyming evening prayer a child might say over all the familiar things in her life: the milk and bread, the bed, the precious toys, her family, etc. I was not remarkably impressed with it, and yet, the illustrations are soft, friendly, and appropriately realistic.
My son (aged 18 months at the time we read this) was fascinated with the pictures of a little girl and familiar things. “Milk!” he said when he saw the picture of the girl drinking some milk. “Shoes!” he said when he saw the shoes. He also liked the up-close faces of children. So while Prayer for a Child wasn’t a must-have winner for me, my son certainly liked looking at the pictures. Prayer for a Child was the 1942 Newbery Winner
