Quick Links:
About the Contest
Prizes
Commemorative Booklet
Judges
Entry form and Guidelines
Additional Resources
Submitting Your Entries
Related Activities
California & National Writing Standards
About the Contest
Letters About Literature is an annual national contest that invites students to write a letter to an author, living or dead, explaining how this author's book gave them wings, became a part of their lives, or changed their way of viewing the world and themselves. Research has proven that children who read, write better; and children who write, read more. This reading-writing link is at the heart of the Letters About Literature program.
The contest is open to students in grades 4-12:
- Level I for students in grades 4-6;
- Level II for students in grades 7-8; and
- Level III for students in grades 9-12.
The contest runs from September to May each year and the deadline for entries is in December. The top California entries at each level advance to the national contest.
top of page
Prizes
California winners receive a cash award of $250, and a $50 Target GiftCard.
Judges for The Center for the Book in the Library of Congress will select six (6) National Winners (2 per Level of Competition) and twelve (12) National Honorable Mention Winners (4 per Level of Competition). The National Winners will receive a $500 Target GiftCard, plus each will win a $10,000 LAL Reading Promotion Grant for their community or school library so that others can experience personal relationships with authors and the stories they tell. Additionally, the National Honorable Mention Winners will each receive a $100 Target GiftCard and a $1,000 LAL Reading Promotion Grant for the community or school library of their choice. Community or school library selected for the National Winners and National Honorable Mention Winners is at the Sponsor’s sole discretion. Refer to the National Level Judging in the Official Rules for more details.
top of page
Commemorative Booklet
The top thirty letters from California are published annually in a Letters About Literature booklet . This booklet also goes to the authors whom the winning letters celebrate.
top of page
Judges
A panel of librarians, authors, and media editors judge the letters each year. Past and present judges include children's book authors Eve Bunting and Theodore Taylor, Patt Morrison - writer and presenter of The Bookshow, and former California State Librarian Dr. Kevin Starr.
top of page
Entry Form and Guidelines
Download this year's entry form or the participation guidelines. The entry form is also available from the California Center for the Book office by calling (310) 206-9361 or emailing calbook@ucla.edu.
top of page
Additional Resources
Teacher Guidelines are not yet available for download.
top of page
Submitting Your Entries
All entries must be postmarked by December 14, 2007!
Mail them to:
Letters About Literature 2007
Competition Level (indicate I, II, or III)
P.O. Box 609
Dallas, PA 18612
Teachers please note: mail class sets in one flat envelope rather than individual envelopes. Although we cannot acknowledge receipt of the letters, we LOVE cover letters and this will ensure that you are put on the Letters About Literature mailing list for next year.
Also, our judges ask that you do not assign the same book to an entire class as this misses the spirit of the Letters About Literature program -- identifying a personal relationship with a particular author and/or book.
top of page
Related Activities
Activities you can do with the Letters About Literature letters in addition to sending them to us to be judged
Honor each student
- Give a certificate to each student who submits a letter to the contest. Click here for a Letters About Literature Certificate of Participation template (PDF format).
- Give special awards, e.g. Funniest, Most Creative
- Display the letters in the classroom and the school hallways
- Partner with your local public library and create a Letters About Literature display in the library.
Publish the letters
- Publish the letters in the school newsletter, the local library newsletter, or the local newspaper.
- Publish the letters on your school website. Tell us when your letters are published online and we will link to them from the California Center for the Book's website.
- Partner with a local literary magazine and publish the students' letters in a special themed issue.
Letters About Literature aloud
- Have students read their letters aloud during Back-to-School night, a school assembly, or at a Letters About Literature celebration night. Invite a local writer to talk about books and reading and present students with certificates of participation.
- Partner with the public library and create a program where students read their letters aloud. Involve local authors and invite them to talk about the authors who have influenced them.
- Contact the local radio station and have students read their letters on air.
- Organize a Letters About Literature program at a local book festival where students can read their letters aloud. Involve local writers, celebrities, or community leaders and invite them to talk about the authors who have influenced them.
Other activities
- Have students design new book covers for the books they write about in their letters.
- Connect older students with younger students as reading mentors.
- Create a book club where students can read and talk about the books they wrote about in their letters.
- Have students conduct imaginary interviews with the author they wrote to, or the characters in the book.
top of page
California & National Writing Standards
LAL, National Writing Standards
Thousands of teachers have found LAL a valuable classroom project. Each year, The Center for the Book in the Library of Congress receives hundreds of letters from teachers testifying how the program's theme and guidelines dovetail with state standards for language arts.
Listed below are the standards recommended by the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association which apply to the LAL program and recommended teaching activities included in the LAL educational supplement:
Students will:
- apply a wide range of strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate and appreciate texts.
- adjust their use of spoken, written, and visual language for a variety of audiences and purposes.
- employ a wide range of writing strategies.
- apply knowledge of language structure, conventions.
- participate as knowledgeable, reflective, creative and critical members of a variety of literacy communities.
- use spoken, written, and visual language to accomplish their own purposes.
LAL, California Writing Standards
For Level I, students will:
- Discern main ideas and concepts presented in texts, identifying and assessing evidence that supports those ideas.
- Draw inferences, conclusions, or generalizations about text and support them with textual evidence and prior knowledge.
- Write clear, coherent sentences and paragraphs that develop a central idea.
- Show that they consider audience and purpose.
- Create multi-paragraph compositions.
- Use concrete sensory details.
For Level II, students will:
- Identify and trace the development of an author's argument, point of view, or perspective.
- Articulate the expressed purposes and characteristics of the author's form of prose.
- Identify and analyze recurrent themes in literature.
- Write using an organizational structure that balances all aspects of the composition and uses effective transitions between sentences to unify important ideas.
- Develop interpretations exhibiting careful reading, understanding, and insight.
- Support and justify all statements and interpretations with anecdotes, descriptions, facts, and specific examples.
For Level III, students will:
- Analyze the ways in which the theme or meaning of a selection represents a view or comment on life, using textual evidence to support the claim.
- Understand the ways in which irony, tone, mood, and style achieve specific rhetorical or aesthetic purposes.
- Structure ideas and arguments in a sustained, persuasive, and sophisticated way and support them with precise and relevant examples.
- Use language in natural, fresh, and vivid ways to establish a specific tone.
- Maintain a balance in describing individual incidents and relate those incidents to more general and abstract ideas.
- Draw comparisons between these specific incidents and broader themes to illustrate the writer's important beliefs or generalizations about life.
top of page |
