What will your children be reading this summer?

I just read an interesting opinion piece in the New York Times by Claire Needell Hollander, a middle school teacher. Her article explains that while young, inexperienced readers should go ahead and read whatever they want during the summer, so long as they read, maturing readers of 10 years old and up will benefit more from selective reading. Ms. Hollander's preferred books build "verbal knowledge (an increase in word recognition) and world knowledge (an increase in understanding about the world around them)."


Ms. Hollander believes that middle- and high-schoolers should not self-select their summer reading. She believes that some students do well with the traditional recommended reading list (heavy on literary novels recognized as "classics"), but she prefers to narrow the students' selection by genre to ensure they are getting the literary diet that will enhance their academic health. Her top picks? High-quality but developmentally appropriate non-fiction. Most revolve on serious moral issues--child soldiers, the bombing of Hiroshima, and the like.


I believe Ms. Hollander when she says that studies have shown that students who read "high quality" material over the summer do better than those who completely self-select. My problem is that this is too short-sighted a goal. We don't just want successful students, we want to make life-long learners who will turn to books for information as well as pleasure. 


So, yeah, a kid who (her comparison) reads The Hunger Games might in the short term learn less words and information that the kid who reads The Red Badge of Courage. But if the kid who read The Hunger Games enjoyed it and develops a real pleasure in reading, they'll might read more as a 30 or 40 year old than the kid who read The Red Badge of Courage and gritted his teeth through the whole thing (not because it's a bad book, but because it was not to his taste). There was a wonderful post on the Nerdy Book Club recently by Sasha Reinhardt about how her low-brow love of The Babysitters' Club series helped develop her lifelong devotion to books. 



And while studies have supported (as mentioned in previous blog posts) that non-fiction appeals to many children who normally don't identify themselves as book-lovers, the serious tone of the books Ms Hollander lists will turn-off many children. The graphic novels Kampung Boy and American-Born Chinese may not appeal to her, but they certainly introduce serious subjects, geographic detail, and lots of new vocabulary in a format that might appeal to reluctant readers more than Francesco D’Adamo and Ann Leonori's Iqbal  or John Hersey's Hiroshima.

Summer reading

image from ClipArt ETC

I'm not a Pinterest fan, but here's a wonderful post by a fellow blogger at the Nerdy Book Club that gives super projects to make summer reading fun in your family. 

Summertime is the perfect time to develop a love of reading in your kids. Kids can select their own reading material based on their own interests rather than what their teachers think they should be reading. They can also read at their own pace without meeting a deadline. If your family (or your child's camp bunk) goes on an interesting outing, they can select books that dovetail nicely with the subject matter.



Many libraries have summer book clubs that your kids can join. Just go see the children's librarian for details at your neighborhood branch.

Almost (but only almost!)

(photo by Ian Britton)

Well, my goal for the summer was to finish my first solo effort at a novel and...I didn't quite finish.

Ugh.

I'm probably just 3,000 words shy of a complete first draft. After ditching my original draft of "Part 3," I had a good think and outlined a new path for the rest of the book. However, I'm having problems bringing myself to sit down and finish.

What's my excuse? Instead of spending quality time with my keyboard, I've been spending quality time with humans (my husband and kids, now back in school), and I've been actively looking for more freelance work.  I finished a writing project last week and submitted something else. It's not like I've been wasting time doing nothing. On the other hand, I have wasted a lot of time blogging, reading weird science news (justifying it as research), and listening to music that's too noisy for effectively focusing on a computer screen.

It's time for a completely non-professional attempt at psychoanalyzing myself. I definitely need to figure out why I don't just sit down for a couple nights and crank out the rest so I can get over it.

1) I used to write for fun. It was relaxing, and even escapist. I still love writing. I'm still very enthusiastic about this project. However, writing has been reclassified in my brain over the last 9 months as a professional exercise and not a hobby. It's actually work.

2) I think I'm a little freaked out about finishing the first draft because I know it will be...a first draft. Like, not perfect. Like, potentially terrible. I guess I have to just accept that it will start out that way, but trust that it'll eventually improve.

Good clean reads

A friend asked me about good clean books (obviously, other than those from reliable Jewish publishers) to share with her preteen and teenage kids during the summer. Here are just a few great books for the (Jewish) kid, all pre-approved by moi. However, you should ALWAYS skim books before letting your kid read them. Even if they are "kosher," they might not be at the right reading level, for example.

(And you do have to take the following into account:

I allow my kids to read books by non-Jews and about non-Jewish subjects--which some frum moms might disapprove of--and I do allow my kids to read about somewhat controversial topics, as long as they are developmentally appropriate. I'm also a big fan of all those treife animals some people shun--I just don't eat them.

However, I ditch books with strong language, completely "un-tznua" romantic situations, excessive violence, flagrant racism or xenophobia, or that promote avodah zara, movies or television.

...And, yes, that includes Disney!)

These books are for kids 8 and up:

The Hobbit (Tolkein)

The Courage of Sarah Noble (Dalgliesh)

The Stories Julian Tells (Cameron)

Binky series of graphic books (Ashley Spires)

Hereville: How Mirka Gets her Sword (Deutsch)

The Rabbi's Girls (Hurwitz)

Baseball Fever (Hurwitz)

The Travels of Benjamin of Tudela (Shulevitz)

Fat Men from Space (Pinkwater)

Bobby vs. Girls (Accidentally) (Lisa Yee)

all Henry Huggins books (Cleary)

Ramona, Ramona the Pest, Beezus and Ramona, Ramona the Brave, Ramona and her Mother, Ramona and her Father (Cleary)

Sarah, Plain and Tall (MacLachlan)

Little House in the Big Woods and Farmer Boy (Wilder)

There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom (Sachar)

Sadako and the Paper Cranes (Coerr)

The Princess Tales, Volume I (Levine)
A Single Shard (Park)
The Thief Lord (Funke)

And these are for age 12 and up:

Dealing with Dragons (Wrede)

Searching for Dragons (Wrede)

Tripods trilogy (John Christopher)

Homecoming (Voight)

The Eye, the Ear and the Arm (Farmer)

The Giver (Lowry)

The Cay (Taylor)

Treasure Island (Stevenson)

all the Little House books not listed above

Island of the Blue Dolphins (O'Dell)

Tuck Everlasting (Babbitt)

Un-Lun-Dun (Mieville)
Bud, Not Buddy (Curtis)

For age 15 and up:

Sorcery and Cecilia (Wrede and Stevemer)

Rabbi Harvey vs. the Wisdom Kid (Scheinkin)

The Blue Sword (McKinley)

The Graveyard Book (Gaiman)
Dealing with Dragons (Wrede)

Catherine, Called Birdy (Cushman)

The Folk Keeper (Billingsley)

The Martian Chronicles (Bradbury)
I Robot (Asimov)

1001 Arabian Nights

When I Was a Slave: Memoirs from the Slave Narrative Collection (Norman R. Yetman, ed.)

A Wizard of Earthsea (Le Guin)
Things Not Seen (Clements)

P.S. There are many other wonderful books out there...please share your "kosher" reading recommendations for the 8+ crowd in a comment below! Also, don't assume other books by the same authors as the above are okay. In many cases, they are most definitely NOT.