My Thirteenth Winter, Schneider Family Book Award Winner 2005

Perhaps you read the title of this post and thought, "Wait a minute. I thought you were blogging about Newbery Award Winners, what's this?" Well, technically it is an award winner. The Schneider Family Book Award is given to books that represent "an artistic expression of the disability experience for child and adolescent audiences". You might not have heard of it, I believe the award was first given in 2004.
Anyway... I believe that this book should be required reading for anyone becoming a teacher, or, for that matter, just anyone interested in working with kids. I read this book quickly, soaking in Samantha's words and feelings. I do not have a learning disability, but I felt like I connected with Samantha Abeel on so many levels. I would read portions of text and think, "Finally! Someone who gets it!" For this reason I think it would also be an excellent reading choice in middle or high school classes.
Samantha Abeel is both gifted and an LD student. (That's Learning Disabled for those of you not in the education racket.) She was passed through the system for years because she was so bright, never disrupted class, and always tried very hard. When her mother finally decided that it wasn't worth her daughter's health and peace of mind to try to keep up with her classmates in math class, she requested that Samantha be put into a special education math program.
This book is full of thought-provoking statements about learning disabilities. I was frequently outraged by the adults in this memoir, I felt that many of them had failed Samantha in a way. She was tested in first grade and discovered deficient in math but gifted elsewhere. The school decided that she would be best off left in general education programs and that eventually it would even out.
Finally, in seventh grade, after years of being nervous about school and anything that required math to the point that she was ill, her mom fought to get her into special classes.
If you care to know what happens next, make sure to pick up this book! :)

The Matchlock Gun, Newbery Winner 1942

For some reason I imagined more of the Newbery books to be longer. People always cite Sarah, Plain and Tall as an example of how a short book can go a long ways, yet here I am with another short Newbery winner. The Matchlock Gun took less than an hour to read... while eating lunch, and walking, and stopping to talk to people, you get the idea.
While I liked this book, I was a bit confused as to why it should be considered so great at the time it was written as to merit the award. Books never exist within a vacuum, which is why we end up with literary classics that may seem prejudiced and insensitive. One look at the date and it is easy to imagine where the committee was going with this one.
The story is one about a family who finds themselves and their freedom threatened. But they fight together and protect their land from the invading Indian forces, saving their freedom even at the cost of health and property... Oh I get it.
You see the award year is actually a year past the publication year. So the award in 1942 is given in January and applies to those books which were published throughout 1941. So in January 1942, when the committee voted on and awarded the medal to The Matchlock Gun they probably had headlines and images in their heads like this:

 

Oh, I get it now.

 

You see, to the committee they are voting on contributions to future literature and current literature. I can see how they would find this an important book for children to be reading. The U.S. had just been attacked, but we had been watching a war unfolding in Europe for a while now. The world was about to see one of the devastating wars in history, and the message about protecting freedom would soon be everywhere you looked, The Matchlock Gun simply had a bit of a head start.
So if you're looking for a short historically relevant piece, I highly recommend The Matchlock Gun.