Laura: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the Clermont County Public Library’s Booklovers Podcast. I’m your host, Laura. And today I’m joined by two librarians, Amy and Stacy. We’re going to talk about the best picturebooks to read aloud. So, Amy, you’re going to get us started.

Table of contents

* Anna Dewdney Read Together Award

* Anna Dewdney quote

* Picturebooks to read aloud

* Everybody Says Meow!

* Anna Dewdney and the LLama LLama series

* Winner announced in May

* More picturebooks to read aloud

* Good Night, Owl

* The Rabbit Listened

* Hooray for Hat!

* Drawn Together

* McToad Mows Tiny Island

* Swashby and the Sea

* Five on the Bed

* You Matter

* Bernice Gets Carried Away

* In conclusion

* You might also enjoy

Anna Dewdney Read Together Award

Amy: [00:00:20] I’m going to talk about the Anna Dewdney Read Together Award, and some of the great picture books are from that. It’s an award given annually to a picture book that is both a superb read-aloud and also sparks compassion, empathy, and connection. Which is something I think that we all need in this world – children, and adults.

Laura: [00:00:41] Absolutely.

Anna Dewdney quote

Amy: [00:00:42] And it is a fairly new award it’s been given out since 2017. It was given an honor of Anna Dewdney. Who’s the author of Llama, Llama, Red Pajamas, and so many other books. She was quoted in the Wall Street Journal before she passed away in 2016 as saying, that she believed that “a good children’s book can be read by an adult to a child and experienced genuinely by both. [And that] reading with children makes an intimate, human connection that teaches that child what it means to be alive as one of the many beings on the planet. [And that] when we read a book with children, then children – no matter how stressed, no matter how challenged – are drawn out of themselves to bond with other human beings, and to see and feel the experiences of others. It is this moment that makes us human. In this sense, reading makes us human.” Which is why these books are given for the empathy and for the connection.

The books that are chosen are chosen from ones that were published within the last five years of the award. And with that, I’m going to get started with one of them.

Picturebooks to read aloud

Everybody Says Meow by Constance Lombardo