Cast of Glee to Perform at White House Egg Roll...Appropriate?

[lisdol]

Originally Posted by formercalifornian

While I don't at all have a problem with the cast of Glee performing at the White House egg roll, I will concede that I, too, am struggling to help my child find appropriate reading material now that she's headed into middle school. Over the past year or so, her reading level soared several grades and the selections in elementary library aren't necessarily all that challenging to her. The school expects her to read at her Accelerated Reading level, even though the fiction selections available at that level are often topically inappropriate. We've gently encouraged her toward some classics and more nonfiction to try to fill in the gap, but it's difficult. (This pressure comes from the academic environment, not me. I'm happy to let her tread water for a year or more, so she can put her intellectual energy into other subjects.) Interestingly, some really popular series for older middle and high-schoolers (e.g., Twilight) are written only at a fourth grade level. Even Harry Potter is more challenging!

I checked out the fiction listed scored at my son's (age 11) lexile level (based on a standardized test given at school) and it was stuff like John Updike and Sylvia Plath. His teacher last year told me just because he is capable of reading at a high school and college level, does not mean much of what is at that level is appropriate (great teacher). So I just let him keep reading things like Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket and other popular boy pre-teen series, and provide Newberry Honor books and classics on the bookshelf at home for him to read when he feels the urge. He is off and on reading the Little House series now.

Also editing to add: like previously mentioned, non-fiction is also a good place to find books at higher levels that are not "too much" for a pre-teen. His interests are various and he usually comes home from the library with a few non-fiction books of the "interest of the week" be it Mayans, the Cold War, etc...

[lucyhoneychurch]

My son is 14 and a very advanced reader. In the past couple of years he has enjoyed the Redwall series, the Warrior series (about cats!), The Edge Chronicles, A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Lord of the Rings, Eragon and its sequels, and the Pendragon series. As a 5th-8th grader myself, I enjoyed Little Women; Caddie Woodlawn; all of the Anne of Green Gables books; Alice in Wonderland; all of the Nancy Drew books (originals from the '30s-70s); Gone With The Wind; The Witch of Blackbird Pond; books by James Herriot; Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time series, etc.