Atre y Pico Award

Atre y Pico AWARD

We received an Arte y Pico Award from 2 blogs: one is The Reading Zone, and the other is a blog called debrennersmith: writing and reading. Thanks so much to Sarah and Deb for honoring us with this award. We're flattered by their kind words!!

Essentially this award is like a Meme. There are rules for paying it forward after your blog gets recognized.

They are as follows:

1) Select 5 blogs that you consider deserving of this award, based on creativity, design, interesting material, and contribution to the blogger community. The blogs can be in any language.
2) Post a link to each blog so that others can visit.
3) Each award-winner has to show the award and link to the blogger that awarded it.

4) The award-winner and the one who has given the prize have to show a link to http://arteypico.blogspot.com/

So, with no further ado, here are 5 blogs we would like to recognize for this award (you'll notice we've included 3 authors we think you should check out):

1) Read, Read, Read by Megan Germano. Megan is a 5th grade teacher with a passion for teaching. We have loved watching her blog in the last year. We love her reviews and find ourselves agreeing with her opinions on books about 100% of the time. Reading someone's blog is more fun once you've met them, and we both got to meet Megan last year at the Dublin Literacy Conference. More importantly, Megan and I (Karen) are card-carrying members of the Barbara O'Connor Fan Club!

2) Creative Literacy is written by Katie D. Katie is someone else we know personally, so we know how committed she is to teaching children, and that comes out clearly in each and every one of her posts! Katie is also a mother to 3 boys, affectionately called Larry, Curly, and Mo, when she writes about them. She is a primary teacher, always on the lookout for the best and brightest picture books to serve as mentor texts for her reading and writing workshops. She is also a person, just like a lot of us, struggling to find the balance in her personal and professional lives, and her posts reflecting on finding this balance are delightful to read. Finally, she is one of our favorite people to call to make a Cover to Cover (children's bookstore) trip!!

3) Jody Feldman, the author of The Gollywhopper Games, has a post that we like to follow closely. Initially, we started reading it to get a glimpse into the mind of the author of a book we enjoyed so much. Now, we read it because we enjoy her reflections on being a writer (she's currently in the middle of a rewrite, and it's been interesting to hear about it -- both the good days and the bad days). She also has "The Friday Five" -- where she shares 5 things she's been thinking about -- they're usually very eclectic items. Each of her posts ends with a face that has an emotion written with it -- this allows us to know her mood for that day or that topic. Jody also writes about herself -- recently she's been doing some volunteer work.

4) James Preller is another author with a blog worth checking out. He is the author of the Jigsaw Jones mystery series, Six Innings, and the soon to be released, Along Came Spider (which we reviewed and loved!!). There are lots of reasons to read Preller's blog. He has Fan Mail Wednesday, where he posts a letter from someone and then responds to it. He also appears to be quite the fan of YouTube, because he's always posting a clip from there. He is an avid fan of baseball and shares that love in a variety of posts on that topic with his blog readers. It is fun hearing about his new projects. But the main reason we include him on our award list is his delight to be part of the kidlit blogosphere. He is so grateful that a place exists where people talk about books for kids.

5) Our final award goes to Sarah Prineas, author of The Magic Thief. We had the good fortune to meet her this past June as we kicked off our 48 Hour Challenge with other Columbus bloggers at Cover to Cover bookstore. She was giving a short talk about her new book, The Magic Thief, and a little about the books that will be sequels to the original. Her blog has been fun to follow as she talks about all that goes into publishing a book for the first time. The post where she quit her day job to take up writing fulltime was fun reading. We chuckle almost every time we read a post that is a conversation between her and her husband! Finally, we followed her and her family during the floods in Iowa City in June.

We hope you check out some of these blogs. They're all good reading!