Did you know that a competition is held every year to choose the best books for young readers? The Young Reader’s Choice Awards (YRCA) has been going on since 1940 and is the only international reading award with participants in Canada and the United States.

Books are nominated in three categories, junior, intermediate, and senior, and are then voted on by young readers to choose the most popular books for that year. Fiction, non-fiction, and graphic novels can be nominated.

There are some amazing nominees this year and Division 7 has a copy of each book from the junior category in our classroom. We even used our Scholastic Readers Club points to purchase two of the books to keep in our class library! (Big thank you to those of you who have been using our class code when purchasing books from Scholastic!)

This year’s junior nominees are:

• Sweep: The Story of a Girl and her Monster by Jonathan Auxier
• The Serpent’s Secret by Sayantani DasGupta
• Granted by John David Anderson
• Small Spaces by Katherine Arden
• Arlo Finch in the Valley of Fire by John August
• Wings of Fire. The Dragonet Prophecy by Tui T. Sutherland ; adapted by Barry Deutsch and Rachel Swirsky (Graphic Novel)
• Positively Izzy by Terri Libenson
• Inkling by Kenneth Oppel

If students have read at least two of the books on the nominee list, they will be able to vote using the ballots in our school library. Voting will be open March 15-May 31.

Time to start reading!