A Suggested Reading list for Junior and High School Students
Level 1 can start at 7th Grade depending on your student
Level 1
Literature:
Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Twain)
The Bronze Bow (Speare)
Diary of Anne Frank (Frank)
The Witch of Blackbird Pond (Speare)
Call of the Wild (London)
Dandelion Wine (Bradbury)
Anne of Green Gables (Montgomery)
A Wizard of Earthsea (LeGuin)
Code Talker (Bruchac)
The Pearl (Steinbeck)
Captains Courageous (Kipling)
Biography:
In Defiance of Hitler (McClafferty)
John Wesley Powell: Explorer of the Grand Canyon (Bruns)
The Story of My Life (Keller)
Level 2
Literature:
To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee)
The Chosen (Potok)
Watership Down (Adams)
And Then There Were None (Christie) or
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Doyle)
The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
Hobbit/LOTR (Tolkein)
A Single Shard (Park)
Shane (Shaeffer)
Little Women (Alcott)
Biography:
A Dangerous Engine: Benjamin Franklin (Dash)
The Good Fight: How WWII Was Won (Ambrose)
Level 3
Science:
Bellwether (Willis)
Water, A Natural History (Outwater)
The Control of Nature (McPhee)
A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bryson)
Mathematics:
Flatland (Abbott)
The Phantom Tollbooth (Juster)
History:
Profiles in Courage (Kennedy)
The Mother Tongue (Bryson)
Literature:
Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury)
Animal Farm (Orwell)
A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Smith)
Philosophy:
Sophie’s World (Gaarder)
The Screwtape Letters (Lewis)
Drama:
Cyrano de Bergerac (Rostand)
The Foreigner (Miller)
Level 4
Mathematics:
The Man Who Counted (Tahan)
Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland (Gamow)
The Tipping Point or The Outliers (Gladwell)
Science:
Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman (Feynman)
The Double Helix (Watson)
Last Child in the Woods (Louv)
History:
Galileo’s Daughter or Longitude (Sobel)
Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage (Lansing)
The Code Book (Singh)
Literature:
The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas)
Peace Like a River (Enger)
Night (Weisel)
Gulliver’s Travels (Swift)
Don Quixote (Cervantes)
David Copperfield (Dickens)
Philosophy:
Man’s Search for Meaning (Frankl)
Room of One’s Own (Woolf)
Anthem (Rand)
Drama:
A Man for All Seasons (Bolt)
The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde)
Level 5
Mathematics:
Freakonomics (Levitt)
The Golden Ratio (Livio)
History:
Common Sense (Paine)
Undaunted Courage or D-Day (Ambrose)
Brave Companions (McCullough)
1776 (McCullough)
Literature:
Killer Angels (Shaara)
The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck)
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe)
Lonesome Dove (McMurtry)
The Last of the Mohicans (Cooper)
The Jungle (Sinclair)
Science:
A Brief History of Time (Hawkins)
Napoleon’s Buttons (LeCouter)
Philosophy: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirsig)
Walden (Thoreau)
Drama:
The Odd Couple (Simon)
Inherit the Wind (Lee)
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Stoppard)
Level 6
Science:
Silent Spring (Carson)
Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn)
Mathematics:
Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Hofstadter)
Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (Seife)
History:
Salt: A World History (Kurlansky)
Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation (Roberts)
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (Stegner)
I Never Had It Made: Autobiography of Jackie Robinson
Wild Swans (Chang)
What If? (Cowley)
Literature:
Cry, the Beloved Country (Paton)
The Color of Water (McBride)
Jeeves and Wooster (Wodehouse)
Brave New World (Huxley)
Moby Dick (Melville)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Márquez)
Wuthering Heights (Bronte)
Philosophy:
Vindication of the Rights of Women (Wollstonecraft)
The Social Contract (Rousseau)
On Liberty (Mill)
Gilead (Robinson)
Drama:
King Lear (Shakespeare)
Twelfth Night (Shakespeare)
Driving Miss Daisy (Uhry)
A Doll’s House (Ibsen)
Would you consider level 1 a little difficult for a 7th grader? I really don't think David can read those. He is just entering 7th grade.
ReplyDeleteSorry, I took so long to respond. I think that you should try him on one or two.
ReplyDeletehttp://sites.google.com/site/karenmcquinn/Home/curriculum/reading-books/5-finger-rule
Rule for comprehension.
5 Finger Rule
Q. What is the 5 Finger Rule for?
A. The 5 Finger Rule is a great way to determine whether or not a given book will be the appropriate reading level for a reader. It relies on the honesty and metacognition (self-awareness of thinking) of the reader to determine whether or not they can decode words, read fluently, understand vocabulary, and apply reading comprehension skills.
1. Turn to a page in the middle of a book.
2. Make a fist and begin reading. Every time you have a "clunk", put up a finger.
3. What's a clunk? As you read the page, for every word you have difficulty reading or don't understand, you have a clunk. If you can't understand what's happening in the book, that's a clunk too.
0 clunks / fingers: too easy
1-3 clunks / fingers: just about right
4-5 clunks/fingers: difficult and challenging, go slow
5+ clunks/fingers: too hard for now
Remember: Just because a book is too hard right now doesn't mean you're a bad reader. It just means you're not quite ready for it. Keep reading every day, especially a mix of "just right" and "a little challenging" books and you'll be on your way!