Here's a few sources I go to:
1. Honey for a Teen's Heart, great discussion of reading and gives both maturity and reading level for books, as well as world views of authors
2. Heart of Dakota, Sonlight
3. My book review opportunities (which are mostly done now)
4. Books from when I taught middle school--I have to go back and review these though, because I am finding that I no longer subscribe to the idea that it doesn't matter what kids are reading as long as they're reading. Instead, I want good stuff to go in their heads and junk food isn't always beneficial. A lot of books have the potential to plant dangerous ideas that I feel I have to be careful about when they are introduced to my kids.
I also keep running lists of the chapter books I find for kids of different ages on one of my other blogs here:
If you have any suggestions that I can add to my lists, please let me know!
3 comments:
I love to browse the Ambleside Online reading lists.
I had forgotten about Ambleside. I looked at their lists. I have several on their lists that I haven't read yet (like the Black Arrow and The Great Brain :) ) There's no modern fiction on the lists, though. Where do you look for suggestions for that?
Modern fiction is more difficult for me. We peruse library shelves and have a book club where I take suggestions from all the families. I pre-read or at least peruse the books we choose and we've found several that we enjoy that way. Many times I just look at favorite authors on Amazon and find other books they've written or I look at our favorites and see "customers who bought this book also bought ..."
My boys are obsessed with Redwall currently and since there are about 22 books, their free reading time is fairly full. That and they generally prefer non-fiction.
Micaela is currently enthralled with all things Shakespeare, she's recently finished the entire Redwall series 3 times, and she still reads and re-reads all of Tolkien- to include the Silmarillion and the Book of Lost Tales and Roverandom and basically anything he ever wrote, so she stays busy reading too and doesn't much care about modern fiction beyond that. She did enjoy the Penderwicks series and the Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place series this year. Modern is hard to classify as well. I assume Jacques and Tolkien and Lewis would be "modern?" She loves Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and wants to read more of him as well. I really can not keep up with her! This week she has been reading The Pickwick Papers, The Black Star, a collection of Romantic Poets, a Wordsworth anthology, a Thoreau anthology, The Hobbit, and Edwin Tunis's Oars, Sails, and Steam. I've told her we're starting school tomorrow and she's going to have to read from my list, but she's convinced she can read it all!
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