What Is The Shoredecott?

By: Em Dickson, Librarian 

 

You may have heard your student recently mention the word “Shoredecott,” along with something to do with medals or voting. That might sound confusing, but it’s actually shorthand for the Grade 4 curricular focus in Library! When I arrived at Shore, I was excited to learn about an existing fourth grade library project, then called the Shore Mock Caldecott Jr., but it was a mouthful. Before long, I blended the phrase into “Shoredecott”, and happily, the name stuck!

 

The Shore Mock Caldecott Jr. debuted in the 2014-2015 school year, with the first medals being hand-drawn versions of the Shore seal. While the basic elements of the project remain the same — Grade 4 students read picture books, vote on them, and then design medals that the younger students vote on — the behind-the-scenes process has grown. Over the course of the school year, we now delve much deeper into the study of picture books as an art form, culminating in the Shoredecott Expo just before March break. 

 

In preparation for discussing picture books, students read Picture This: How Pictures Work by Molly Bang. Bang, a three-time Caldecott Honoree, introduces how color, shape, size, and space work together to engage our emotions and ultimately tell a story. Like Molly Bang in Picture This, Grade 4 students next use cut paper to explore picture structure.

 

Next, students learn about the history of the Caldecott Award and the award criteria by way of exploring winners from over the years. What does it mean for a picture book to demonstrate “excellence?" What does a truly successful picture book look like? When looking at picture books, we use 'The Whole Book Approach,' developed by Megan Dowd Lambert in association with the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, MA. Through this approach, students engage with the picture book not just as a story but as an art form, going over every aspect, from the book jacket, to the case cover, to the endpapers, to the copyright page, to the backmatter, and on throughout the story, harkening back to the principles of picture structure examined in Picture This. After all, the Caldecott is an award designed to honor excellent illustration.

 

A common favorite element of picture structure, as represented in picture books, is the “page turn”: We read left to right in the English language, and we read pictures in the same way. Go grab one of your favorite picture books from your shelves, open it up, and look closely. Do you notice that the illustrations are often facing, pointing, or leading us to the right? Encouraging us in the direction of where we turn the page? And if the illustrations are facing to the left, or backward, consider the emotional resonance of the scene: Is the art asking us to pause, or to reflect, and if so, why might that be?

 

At this stage in the process, students are now ready to examine picture books as members of the Shoredecott Committee. Each Grade 4 class section receives their own longlist of approximately twenty books to read and evaluate using the official Caldecott criteria before we begin our first round of voting. The top 7-8 books from each class advance into the shortlist, where we carefully review each book before moving into final voting. The day the Shoredecott winner is revealed is probably the loudest any library has ever been as the entire space echoes with excitement! But who can blame the students, especially when they learn that their own selected Shoredecott winner also won a real Caldecott Honor or Medal — something that has happened almost every year since the project began in 2015.

 

The project culminates in the Shoredecott Expo, an event where each student presents one of the picture books from the original longlist to an audience of faculty and staff, families, and community members, and tries to convince the audience to vote for their book. It is a special thing for any teacher to have the opportunity to step back and witness their students showcasing what we've learned so passionately, and I generally spend the event grinning and taking badly-angled photos with my phone like an ill-trained paparazzi.

 

At the 2025 Massachusetts School Library Association conference, I was given a free light-up Minecraft sword from one of the vendors. What was I going to do with a sword? Well, the timing coincided with the Shoredecott Expo, so at its conclusion and in celebration, I used the sword to knight each Grade 4 student, reciting: “I hereby dub thee, Master of the Shoredecott!” In a dream world, there is a high-speed train between Beverly and Amherst, MA, the home of the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, so that I could take Grade 4 on a field trip there each year. In the meantime, I enjoy presenting the online exhibition Now & Then: Contemporary Illustrators and Their Childhood Art. Maybe one day, we will even see a former Master of the Shoredecott on exhibit at the Carle Museum – or hear about one serving on the real Caldecott Committee.