And the winner for the Big Words Award is...Big Words for Little People, written by Jamie Lee Curtis, which was nominated by Lisa Ickes.

October 30, 2008

Ms. Jamie Lee Curtis
HarperCollins Children’s Books
1350 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10019

Dear Ms. Curtis:

Congratulations! You have been awarded The BIG Words Award in recognition of your outstanding children’s literature book, Big Words for Little People. What is The BIG Words Award? This award was created in September of 2008 to honor the author of a picture book that challenges children’s verbal communication, embraces complex language and encourages children to expand their spoken and written vocabularies. I established The Big Words Award as part of an assignment for my Language and Literacy Education course at Pennsylvania State University. Each student was required to develop an award for a specific group of children’s books. Once the awards were generated, students in the class nominated texts for one another’s award, based on the provided requirements. After the nominations were submitted, the award creators carefully selected the winning text.

I chose to base my award on “big words” because it is my belief that many picture books today are dumbed down for our youth in order to make a sale and please publishers. Instead of setting high expectations, authors choose to lower their standards of the vocabulary utilized in their books. “The more we believe that children are limited in various ways, the more we deprive them of experiences that might make them less limited…If we believe that [children:] cannot understand complicated language, we will give them only books with limited vocabularies…Deprived of the experience of anything more than the little we believe them capable of, children often do learn to be inflexible, intolerant of the complex and the unconventional” [Perry Nodelman:]. By creating this award, I wanted to honor those authors brave enough to incorporate big words in their stories.

I chose Big Words for Little People to receive The BIG Words Award for several reasons. First of all, complex language is the focus of the text. Not only do you use complicated terms in your story, but you provide their definitions and examples of how one would utilize these words in their everyday speech as well. This book promotes a child’s interest in reading while still educating him or her. The overall message is one of love and family, concepts that are slowly being undervalued in our society. Most importantly, Big Words for Little People is entertaining for readers young and old.

Congratulations,



Cherina A. Strait