Last month we did another episode of Live From Our Library on the Scholastic Parents Facebook page, and since we are in the summer reading zone I (mostly) focused on book recommendations that speak to our theme this summer – Happy Camper. This gave me the opportunity to talk about one of my favorite books from childhood, I Want to Go Home by Gordon Korman. I also threw in a few Beach (by Elisha Cooper) reads and YA titles about summer jobs. Check it out:
If you would like to see the list of titles recommended in this video, check out the Scholastic Parents Raise a Reader blog post here.
What was really cool this time around was that we got a question from Tanzania! Like many who asked questions, this viewer was looking for a summer book list for a specific age group. In the broadcast we try to cover all ages, which limits the number of books per group we have time to talk about, so for more in depth lists here are some recommendations:
- Scholastic Parents: Book Lists and Recommendations
- Scholastic Teachers: Ready-to-Go Book Lists for Teachers
- Scholastic Teachers: Best of Blogs: Great Book Lists
- On Our Minds: The Official Blog of Scholastic Inc.
- Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge
Here are two other questions that were asked during this chat:
- My son loved the I Survived books. He is now in 8th grade. Is there something similar for that age level? The day of the broadcast I recommended Chris Lynch’s books, particularly the World War II and Vietnam series. I’d like to add to that Zane and the Hurricane: A Story of Katrina, by Rodman Philbrick, Hidden Like Anne Frank: 14 True Stories of Survival, by Marcel Prins and Peter Henk Steenhuis, The Nazi Hunters: How a Team of Spies and Survivors Captured the World's Most Notorious Nazi, by Neal Bascomb, Jim Thorpe: Original All-American, by Joseph Bruchac, and I personally really enjoyed Uprising, by Margaret Peterson Haddix, which is about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
My 3rd grader loves historical fiction books like the "I Survived" series. He has read them all. Do you have any other chapter books recommendations that are close to the "I Survived" series? My first thought is My Name is America, which is a series of historical epistolary novels (written like diaries) with children living through different American historical moments; the series has an all-star cast of authors, including Walter Dean Myers, Jim Murphy, Ann Rinaldi, Laurence Yep, and Joseph Bruchac. Other adventure series similar to I Survived are Disaster Strikes, by Marlane Kennedy, Storm Runners, by Roland Smith, and the multiplatform series Infinity Ring, where the kids travel through time to big moments in history. For a standalone, non-series read try Tim Tingle’s How I Became a Ghost.
As you can see, there is a lot of interest in historical fiction, particularly among parents whose children enjoyed the I Survived series. Check out author Lauren Tarshis discussing the appeal of these stories for young readers in the Scholastic Reads podcast “Stories of Survival with Lauren Tarshis”.
Tune in the Scholastic Parents Facebook page next Friday June 16th for the next installment of Live From Our Library!
