Pot-O-Gold Blogger Award #13: Excellent Picture Book Blogs

Pixel Berry Pie Designs

It's time to award another lucky blogger with the Pot-O-Gold Blogger Award! I created this award for excellent blogs based on interesting and helpful content AND visually appealing and easy-to-navigate design. It's an award that says, "Look at this awesome blog! There's a wealth of information here! If you visit once, you'll want to return again and again." In other words, it's like discovering a pot of gold.

Today's award goes out to the amazing Rob Sanders, author of the Picture This! blog, A Daily Guide to Picture Book Writing. His blog has been around for a little over a year and still going strong. Rob's debut picture book, Cowboy Christmas, will be released from Golden Books/Random House later this year. He is "a writer who teaches and a teacher who writes". His blog has so much excellent content, you'll never want to leave; it's extremely relevant and useful. He posts Sunday through Friday, hence the tagline "A Daily Guide". (I bet he spends all day Saturday writing his posts...) Each of his posts for any given week are thematic. On Sundays, he posts the theme for the upcoming week. For example, the week of Feb 5, 2012 (this week), the theme was "The Power of Critiques". And he also lists the daily topic for the whole week. Check it out! And that's just ONE week! Oh, believe me, there is much, much more to learn from the ever-talented Rob Sanders!

Monday—Finding a Critique Group

Tuesday—Beginning a Critique Group

Wednesday—Strategies for Giving Critiques

Thursday—Receiving Critiques

Friday—Putting Critiques into Action

My ratings (out of 4):  Content  Design  (could be easier to navigate)

I also have three runner-ups this week for excellent picture book blogs, because they share similar features and/or blog titles.

1. Picture This, by Sarah Frances Hardy, author and illustrator of Puzzled by Pink (Viking Children's Books, Spring 2012)
2. Picture This! Teaching with Picture Books,  by Dawn Little, founder of Links to Literacy, an educational consulting company.
3. Teach with Picture Books, by Keith Schoch, teacher and blogger at How to Teach a Novel. (Although he hasn't posted since April 2011, he has over 1,000 followers combined.) 

The Rules (you can copy and paste them):

1. Say thank you to the person who gave it to you.
2. Thank the giver (include image of award, link to the giver's blog and to WRITE WILD).
3. Award FOUR bloggers this award and tell why each is a Pot-O-Gold!
4. Share FOUR simple things about yourself: 
1. a time you had to exercise FAITH
2. something you HOPE for
3. something you LOVE
4. a time when you experienced LUCK.

Keep on keepin' on...