Showing posts with label Book Lists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Book Lists. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Good Books for Middle Scool Boys and Girls :-)

These books are classics. The appropriate age level ranges from ~4th to ~6th grade 
(or 7th grade - because they are just that good!)

AUTHOR: E. Nesbit 
Long Ago When I Was Young  (not so good)
Railway Children  (very good) You can listen to the story for free @ LibriVox
Five Children & It  (very good) You can listen to the story for free @ LibriVox
Treasure Seekers (very good)  You can listen to the story for free @ BooksShouldBeFree

AUTHOR: Henry Winterfeld  
Detectives in Togas  (very good)
Roman Ransom  (very good)
Trouble at Timpetill (very good)
Castaways in Lilliput (very good)

AUTHOR: Nancy Carlson 
Orpheline series (very good)
AUTHOR: Elizabeth Enright 
Saturday series - A four-book series about the heartwarming Melendy family.   (very good)

AUTHOR: Hilda Van Stockum 
Mitchells & Sullivans- series (very good) 
~~ The Mitchells: Five for Victory
~~ Canadian Summer
~~ Friendly Gables

AUTHOR: Sydney Taylor 
All of a Kind Family series - look into a Jewish family life  (very good)
Set in New York City (the East Side), the book details the lives of stair-step sisters, along with their parents. 

AUTHOR: Lois Lenski 

AUTHOR: Meindert DeJong 
The Wheel on the School (very good)  
Why do the storks no longer come to the little Dutch fishing village of Shora to nest? It was Lina, one of the six schoolchildren who first asked the question, and she set the others to wondering. And sometimes when you begin to wonder, you begin to make things happen. So the children set out to bring the storks back to Shora. The force of their vision put the whole village to work until at last the dream began to come true.
Winner, 1955 Newbery Medal
Notable Children's Books of 1940–1970 (ALA)
1963 Lewis Carroll Shelf Award
See also: Summary from Embracing the Child
 
AUTHOR: Ethel Brill
Madeleine Takes Command   (very good)
Madeleine Verchere's story is based on a true account of colonial French Canada of the 1690's. Harassed by Iroquois, the Verchere family's fort must keep a continual guard. 14-year-old Madeleine is left alone with two younger brothers and few others when the Indians attack. We follow the brave and determined stratagems of Madeleine and her small circle. Madeleine's youthful leadership, especially of her brothers, will win the reader's admiration. 

AUTHOR: Carol Hoff  
Johnny Texas (very good)   A great example of a chapter to chapter summary of Johny Texas with student drawn pictures here @ Library.ThinkQuest.org
Johnny Texas on San Antonio Road (very good) 

AUTHOR: Anne Holm
I am David (1963) is her best known book.  (very good)
It was made into a film in 2003 and also also published with name North to Freedom.
The movie is great but the book is better. A nice treat after book is read.
The book tells the story of a 12-year old boy who escapes from a concentration camp, and travels through Europe.  

AUTHOR: Joseph B. Egan
Donn Fendler - Lost on A Mountain in Maine  (very good)  The true story of survival of a boy scout.

A good reference is Laura Berquist's DYOCC book for titles- and just picked for current interest, studies or trips. Also, Bethlehem books has great choices!

Finding out of print books is often like finding a treasure.
Jan Wright in Minnesota has some great choices - not many Catholic - but there are some hidden in there. She has many in DYOCC and other book list sources. Her descriptions are accurate - and she likes to help find collectibles.
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Wednesday, September 29, 2010

How to Raise Boys Who Read

Hint: Not with gross-out books and video-game bribes.

When I was a young boy, America's elite schools and universities were almost entirely reserved for males. That seems incredible now, in an era when headlines suggest that boys are largely unfit for the classroom. In particular, they can't read.
According to a recent report from the Center on Education Policy, for example, substantially more boys than girls score below the proficiency level on the annual National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test. This disparity goes back to 1992, and in some states the percentage of boys proficient in reading is now more than ten points below that of girls. The male-female reading gap is found in every socio-economic and ethnic category, including the children of white, college-educated parents.
The good news is that influential people have noticed this problem. The bad news is that many of them have perfectly awful ideas for solving it.

Everyone agrees that if boys don't read well, it's because they don't read enough. But why don't they read? A considerable number of teachers and librarians believe that boys are simply bored by the "stuffy" literature they encounter in school. According to a revealing Associated Press story in July these experts insist that we must "meet them where they are"—that is, pander to boys' untutored tastes.
For elementary- and middle-school boys, that means "books that exploit [their] love of bodily functions and gross-out humor." AP reported that one school librarian treats her pupils to "grossology" parties. "Just get 'em reading," she counsels cheerily. "Worry about what they're reading later."

There certainly is no shortage of publishers ready to meet boys where they are. Scholastic has profitably catered to the gross-out market for years with its "Goosebumps" and "Captain Underpants" series. Its latest bestsellers are the "Butt Books," a series that began with "The Day My Butt Went Psycho."
The more venerable houses are just as willing to aim low. Penguin, which once used the slogan, "the library of every educated person," has its own "Gross Out" line for boys, including such new classics as "Sir Fartsalot Hunts the Booger."

Workman Publishing made its name telling women "What to Expect When You're Expecting." How many of them expected they'd be buying "Oh, Yuck! The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty" a few years later from the same publisher? Even a self-published author like Raymond Bean—nom de plume of the fourth-grade teacher who wrote "SweetFarts"—can make it big in this genre. His flatulence-themed opus hit no. 3 in children's humor on Amazon. The sequel debuts this fall.

Education was once understood as training for freedom. Not merely the transmission of information, education entailed the formation of manners and taste. Aristotle thought we should be raised "so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought; this is the right education."
"Plato before him," writes C. S. Lewis, "had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting, and hateful."

This kind of training goes against the grain, and who has time for that? How much easier to meet children where they are.

One obvious problem with the SweetFarts philosophy of education is that it is more suited to producing a generation of barbarians and morons than to raising the sort of men who make good husbands, fathers and professionals. If you keep meeting a boy where he is, he doesn't go very far.
The other problem is that pandering doesn't address the real reason boys won't read. My own experience with six sons is that even the squirmiest boy does not require lurid or vulgar material to sustain his interest in a book.

So why won't boys read? The AP story drops a clue when it describes the efforts of one frustrated couple with their 13-year-old unlettered son: "They've tried bribing him with new video games." Good grief.

The appearance of the boy-girl literacy gap happens to coincide with the proliferation of video games and other electronic forms of entertainment over the last decade or two. Boys spend far more time "plugged in" than girls do. Could the reading gap have more to do with competition for boys' attention than with their supposed inability to focus on anything other than outhouse humor?

Dr. Robert Weis, a psychology professor at Denison University, confirmed this suspicion in a randomized controlled trial of the effect of video games on academic ability. Boys with video games at home, he found, spend more time playing them than reading, and their academic performance suffers substantially. Hard to believe, isn't it, but Science has spoken.

The secret to raising boys who read, I submit, is pretty simple—keep electronic media, especially video games and recreational Internet, under control (that is to say, almost completely absent). Then fill your shelves with good books.

People who think that a book—even R.L. Stine's grossest masterpiece—can compete with the powerful stimulation of an electronic screen are kidding themselves. But on the level playing field of a quiet den or bedroom, a good book like "Treasure Island" will hold a boy's attention quite as well as "Zombie Butts from Uranus." Who knows—a boy deprived of electronic stimulation might even become desperate enough to read Jane Austen.
Most importantly, a boy raised on great literature is more likely to grow up to think, to speak, and to write like a civilized man. Whom would you prefer to have shaped the boyhood imagination of your daughter's husband—Raymond Bean or Robert Louis Stevenson?

I offer a final piece of evidence that is perhaps unanswerable: There is no literacy gap between home-schooled boys and girls. How many of these families, do you suppose, have thrown grossology parties?
 

SOURCE: Wall Street Journal - Opinion Journal
I believe this link may be time sensitive.
Formatting and graphics by Soutenus

This article is by Mr. Thomas Spence.
Mr. Spence is president of Spence Publishing Company in Dallas.



Thomas Spence

Thomas Spence is president and publisher of Spence Publishing and a director of Spence Media. After graduating from Dartmouth College, he earned a law degree from the University of Chicago and a master’s in history from Harvard. He was editor in chief at WRS Publishing before founding Spence Publishing in 1996.

He has been featured in Publishers Weekly, the Boston Globe, the Dartmouth Review, Insight, and the Washington Times and has written for the Dallas Morning News and the American Enterprise.
Spence Publishing Co. • 5646 Milton Street, Suite 314 • Dallas, TX 75206 • 888.773.6782 • Fax 214.939.1800 
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Thursday, October 22, 2009

4th Grade Book List - ReadWriteThink & TeachersFirst

Books for Children Ages 9-12 - More Books by Grade Level from TeachersFirst

Charlotte's Web by E. B. White
Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Little House on the Prarie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner
Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan
The Indian in the Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks
Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell
Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli
The BFG by Roald Dahl
The Giver by Lois Lowry
James and the Giant Peach: A Children's Story by Roald Dahl
Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor
Stone Fox by John Reynolds Gardiner
Number the Stars by Lois Lowry
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh by Robert C. O'Brien
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson
Matilda by Roald Dahl
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume
Ramona Quimby, Age 8 by Beverly Cleary
The Trumpet of the Swan by E. B. White
The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt
Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder - Laura Ingalls Wilder Webquest
Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar
Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh
A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
Mr. Popper's Penguins by Richard Atwater
My Father's Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett
Stuart Little by E. B. White
Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech
The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare
The Watsons Go to Birmingham-1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis

Books for Young Adults - More Books by Grade Level from TeachersFirst

Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls
The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
Summer of the Monkeys by Wilson Rawls
The Cay by Theodore Taylor
The Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth George Speare

source: ReadWriteThink

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