Ideas for Using the Monarch Award Nominees (for 2022) in Your Classroom

The Monarch Award 2022

In 2003, The Monarch Award was established in Illinois. The Association of Illinois School Library Educators (AISLE), wanted an award for children’s books aimed at grades K-3. Their goal was to promote the freedom and inclusion that being a critical and independent reader brings. In this post we will explore the nominees for the 2022 Monarch Award, and ways you can bring these books to life in the classroom.

Using Texts to Represent and Celebrate Diversity

Focusing on diversity in the classroom is paramount. Our students come from so many different places, and from so many different backgrounds, it may seem impossible to ensure that all of our students feel seen and can identify with the literature that we present. However, this task is getting easier by the day with the plethora of new books being written by diverse authors to bring a spotlight to those cultures that until now have not had a large presence in children’s literature.

One of the wonderful things about the nominees for this year’s Monarch award is that almost every single one of them is multicultural. Here are a few examples:

While these are not all of the nominees that include multicultural characters, these are several to help get you started. Any of these books could be used to highlight the amazing and beautiful parts of other cultures or groups of people that our students may or may not be familiar with. The most important thing here is that there are so many different options, that I’m certain almost all of us could find a book that each child in our classrooms could identify with. These books could be used with various standards, for many purposes.

When Grandma Gives You a Lemon Tree by Jamie L.B. Deenihan

This book is a quick and funny read that my students love. It is not only a great lesson about what do to do when you are given a present that you weren’t expecting (manners, anyone?) but also how to turn something you don’t understand about someone into an opportunity to learn new things.

Between Us and Abuela: A Family Story from the Border by Mitali Perkins

An incredibly heartwarming story about a family finding ways to celebrate Christmas while separated by the Mexico/California border provides the perfect opportunity to highlight the issues facing families of different cultures around the world and the innovative ways they solve them. It could also lead to discussions concerning compassion for challenges we have never personally experienced, or ways we could help others with unique challenges.

The Proudest Blue: A Story of Hijab and Family by Ibtihaj Muhammad

Faizah and Asiya are excited for their first day of school until they encounter stigma and unkindness surrounding Asiya’s hijab. A critical story based in reality for many students, this is a great resource to highlight kindness, compassion, and understanding for people who are different and cultures we don’t have familiarity with. So many conversations at every level could be brought about from this story, especially those about approaching aspects of other cultures we don’t know with a desire to learn rather than with a spirit of judgement.

Fry Bread by Kevin Noble Maillard

Last of the books to be discussed, but not least, is Fry Bread. I am attaching the link here to the entire blog post and resources I’ve created about this wonderful book.

Fry Bread Activities – Inspire Me ASAP

Integrating Subjects as a Key to Success

As teachers, we know how stressful it can be to try and fit everything in the school day. One way to make this easier is by integrating subjects or teaching more than one subject at a time. When I was reviewing and researching the nominees, I noticed some fantastic examples of books you can use to teach science and reading, all at the same time!

The Very Impatient Caterpillar by Ross Burach

Science Connection: life cycles

In this story, we follow a caterpillar who cannot wait to become a butterfly. As he goes through each stage of metamorphosis, he grows more and more impatient with how long the process takes. My students LOVE this story. They crack up throughout the entire book, and learn fantastic science vocabulary, and the steps of a butterfly’s metamorphosis along the way.

There are so many resources out there to help you teach both reading standards, vocabulary standards, science standards, and even SEL with this multipurpose book. Have students do Reader’s Theater and reenact the story with the correct stages of a butterfly’s life cycle. Create a timeline to retell the story and track the stages. Teach context clues with academic vocabulary. The possibilities are endless!

Honeybee: The Busy Life of Apis Mellifera by Candace Fleming

Science Connection: life cycles, pollinators

The illustrations in this book are gorgeous! They follow a bee through its life cycle, exposing students to rich and challenging academic vocabulary. While definitely geared toward 3rd grade +, this book could easily be used for lessons centered around illustrations for the younger students.

Finding the meaning of unknown words is the name of the game here. Lessons on using dictionaries and context clues would be perfect to grow students’ academic vocabulary. Tracking the process of pollination and bridging this book with online research about the importance of bees could be a great extension as well.

Comparing and Contrasting with Fairy Tales

Fairy tales and the skill of comparison come up in some capacity at many grade levels all through elementary. Little Red Riding Hood is a classic used for this all the time, and the Monarch nominees provide another more modern text to compare it to.

Federico and the Wolf follows the basic premise of Little Red Riding Hood with some big differences. Federico is going to visit his grandfather to make their special salsa in this rendition of the story. When Federico notices a few too many similarities between El Lobo and his grandfather, Federico is able to drive the wolf away. A fun addition to the end of this story is the recipe for Federico’s salsa! Make the salsa together as a class as an enrichment to the story as you compare this text to the original version.

Need the original version? Want to add some non-fiction text as well? I’ve got you covered! This paired text resource will let you extend this lesson farther than just comparing the two versions of the story. You could also compare real wolves to the wolves in each story as well! (Looking at you, primary teachers!)

Here’s the link to that resource: Little Red Riding Hood by Inspire Me ASAP | Teachers Pay Teacher

Social Emotional Learning is Crucial

SEL (social emotional learning) keeps popping up in the professional lives of us educators for good reason. Students right now need these skills in order to be healthy adults able to deal with others as they get older. All of the challenges of the past three years have made those skills more important than ever, and many students are only being exposed to those skills at school. Here are a few of the nominees that make teaching SEL easy.

I Am Every Good Thing by Derrick Barnes

The importance of representation and diversity extends to the books we choose to educate our students socially and emotionally. If they are not seeing themselves, and able to identify with the characters in the book, they are not going to absorb the lessons as well. I Am Every Good Thing is a very powerful book to add to your SEL collection. Following a member of our minority students that sometimes feel left out or misunderstood, this book brings them back into the fold and helps them to recognize that they have so much potential in them as well. The lines from this empowering book could be used around the classroom, or even around a mirror, to become mantras for our students. They are good. They are capable. They can achieve anything they put their minds to.

Just Ask! Be Different, Be Brave, Be You – by Sonia Sotomayor

Written by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, this story highlights the ways our differences make for a more colorful and well-rounded world. As the children in this story plant a community garden, they start to see that some of them have differences they are unfamiliar with. Instead of treating those children as less than the others, the kids ask each other about the reasons they are different. This leads the children to learn that people being different or having different abilities makes everyone special in their own ways. Everyone shines in their own way, just like the varying plants and flowers in a garden.

SumoKitty by David Biedrzycki

The Japanese have a saying that goes, “fall down seven times, stand up eight”. This is the message that SumoKitty revolves around. After a stray gets a job catching mice in a stable, he realizes he needs to train like a Sumo wrestler to be good at his job – not just eat like one. He enlists help from a friend and learns the skills of perseverance and hard work. Messages and skills our students need in addition to a growth mindset in order to succeed.