award winners, ice cream

The Newbery and Caldecott and Geisel awards have all been announced and therefore my curriculum is about to move into the next phase, a shift of overwhelming overwhelmingness. These units are easy. It is easy to make a bunch of kids read a pile of books and then rate them with stars and commentary. Easy. Harder – making kids learn stuff.

In case you were curious, the big winners were:

(Why, yes, that WAS my absolute favorite book of the year! Thanks for remembering! And yes, my Newbery club DID give it an honor!)

YAY, Pinkney! First individual African-American illustrator to win the medal (he won the honor 5 times before) – the only other African-Americans to win were the Dillons (a married couple) in '76 and '77. My Caldecott kids largely ignored this wordless gem but I totally called this as winner (along with every other librarian paying attention, pretty much).

My Mock Geisel kids didn't have this in their To-Be-Considered pile because… some dad of a fourth grader at my school has had it checked out for months to read to his 3 year old. Ah well. The kids know the Toon series of books and are pleased with it as winner.

On the topic of winning, I share with you the following:

My Melissa friend is visiting, best friend of more than 20 years now (holy crap we are old), and we were ice cream shopping in the endless aisle of Fairway. Coming from a small town, she was frozen by too much choice. So we started comparing labels. I showed her my favorite Haagen Dazs Five brand and then we got curious about what horrible chemicals were in regular ice cream – in other words, if Five is marketed as being so pure and lovely, what's with the real stuff?

At first we couldn't see the difference and dismissed it as a marketing ploy. Then we realized that the regular Vanilla Bean flavor has cream listed as the first ingredient and skim milk listed second, whereas the Five version has skim milk first and cream second. Which is why it has 32% less fat.

We decided to buy both.

And then Wes decided we should have a taste test.

Tightly controlled by Wes using two spoons, he tested Melissa and her husband and me. And we were all shocked by the results, that we all preferred the Five (the two of them less vehemently, me firmly).

Our unanimity was skewed by outlier Asia, over to hang out the next night and subjected to Wes' test. She preferred the regular. I do wonder if I prefer it so strongly because it is what I normally buy – I am used to it. Still, the fact that it did so well and has much less fat should be of use to many out there. Go for the Five and you'll barely notice a difference. Unless you are Asia.

I should say here, though if you read the damn story you can see this plainly, but I was not compensated for this review and Melissa and I paid for the ice cream our own damn selves.