Jigsaw Assignment

My group was assigned the Sydney Taylor Book Award to research. I have never heard of this award and I was very interested to see what it dealt with. When I first began researching the Sydney Taylor award, I instantly found out that it deals with Jewish books. The mission of this award is to " encourage the publication of outstanding books of Jewish content for children, books that exemplify the highest literary standards while authentically portraying the Jewish experience." I think that it's great that one of the missions of this award is to ensure that the Jewish "experience" is being portrayed accurately and appropriately. Many times, award committees are so excited about a book being published, that they forget to actually judge the context of the book and I think that it's great that this award has made an honest effort to counter that.

Sydney Taylor grew up in the Lower East side of New York. Sydney only had one daughter and she felt that her daughter was lonely, so she began telling her of her experiences growing up. Sydney wrote these stories down and they were eventually submitted and published.

I really enjoyed researching about this award, especially because I had no prior knowledge of it. I'm very excited for class tomorrow, where we can all share our awards and learn about many new cultures.