Kids Recommend

• Kindergarten
• Gr. 1-2
• Gr. 3-4 Boys
• Gr. 3-4 Girls
• Gr. 5-6 Boys
• Gr. 5-6 Girls
• Gr. 7-8 Boys
• Gr. 7-8 Girls

About the Book Lists

Over my twenty years of teaching reading in a workshop, the annual average, for a class of seventh and eighth graders, is at least forty books. In the lower grades at my current school, the Center for Teaching and Learning, the numbers are similarly remarkable. My K-6 colleagues and I make time every day for our students to curl up with good books and engage in the single activity that consistently correlates with high levels of performance on standardized tests of reading ability. And that is frequent, voluminous, self-selected reading. A child sitting in a quiet room with a good book isn’t a flashy or, more significantly, marketable teaching method. It just happens to be the only way anyone ever grew up to become a reader.

And that is the goal: for every child we teach to become a skilled, passionate, habitual, critical reader—as novelist Robertson Davies put it, to learn how to make of reading “a personal art.” Along the way, CTL teachers hope that our students will become smarter, happier, more just, and more compassionate people because of the worlds they experience within those hundreds of thousands of black lines of print.

We know that students need time to read, at school and at home, every day. We understand that when particular children love their particular books, reading is more likely to happen during the time we set aside for it. And we have learned that the only sure-fire way to induce a love of books is to invite students to select their own. So CTL teachers buy the best children’s literature we can find, conduct booktalks and bookwalks, and help our students choose books, develop and refine their literary criteria, and carve out identities for themselves as readers. We get that it’s essential for every child we teach to be able to say, "These are my favorite authors, genres, books, and characters this year, and this is why." Personal preference is the foundation, walls, and ceiling in building a reader for a lifetime.

At CTL, starting in kindergarten and going straight through until the end of middle school, free choice of books is a child’s right, not an occasional privilege granted by a kind teacher. Our students have shown us that opportunities to consider, select, and reconsider books make reading feel sensible and attractive to children right from the start—that they’ll read more books than we ever dreamed possible and more challenging books than we ever dreamed of assigning them.

We’ve also learned that students need access to a wide, up-to-date assortment of inviting titles. Instead of investing in class sets of novels or expensive basals or anthologies, CTL has made classroom libraries of individual titles our budget priority. Teachers read a lot of the books that we hope our students will, so we can make knowledgeable recommendations. We offer help when readers need it, and we teach children, one at a time, about books and reading in the daily, quiet conversations of our reading workshops.

And we understand that the only delivery system for reading comprehension is reading. When reading is meaning-filled, understanding cannot be separated from decoding. Reading comprehension is not a set of sub-skills or strategies that children need to be taught to bring to bear, after they’ve translated letters to sounds. When students are reading stories that are interesting to them, and when the books are written at their independent reading levels, comprehension—the making of meaning—is direct, and kids understand.

Human beings are wired to understand. As reading theorist Frank Smith puts it, “Children know how to comprehend, provided they are in a situation that has the possibility of making sense to them” (1997). Reading workshop is our best approximation of an instructional context that has the possibility of making sense to young readers. A child sits in a quiet, book-filled space, engrossed in a beloved, accessible book in the company of classmates who are reading and loving books, too, along with a teacher who knows about literature, reading, and his or her students.

This is not a dream world. Because CTL is a non-profit demonstration school, a place where public school teachers come to learn about innovative methods, we handpick a student body that represents a diverse range of socioeconomic backgrounds and ability levels. We fundraise twelve months a year, so we can set a tuition rate that's as low as possible: most recently $6,850 per year. Last year the average tuition, after financial aid adjustments, was just $4,981 per student, a fee lower than that for a school year's worth of daycare. The point is to attract a mix of students in whom visiting teachers can recognize their own.

And they do, because CTL students are regular kids. They suffer ADHD and identified learning disabilities, including nonverbal learning disorders, visual processing difficulties, and dyslexia. Some kids come from homes with packed bookshelves; some students own only a few books of their own. Maine is a rural state and a poor one, in the bottom third nationally in terms of per capita income. Only 66% of jobs here pay a livable wage, and CTL students’ parents work hard at all kinds of occupations: farmer, carpenter, sheetrocker, store clerk, soldier, fisherman, gardener, postal worker, and housecleaner, as well as physician, minister, teacher, and small-business owner.

So we do not believe that nationally CTL students’ accomplishments as readers can be explained away as some kind of anomaly. Ours is not a privileged population of students. This is what is possible for children as readers.

It’s also important to understand that reading workshop is not S.S.R. (Sustained Silent Reading). It’s not a study hall, where we watch the clock with one eye as we D.E.A.R. (Drop Everything And Read). In reading workshop, we teach readers for a lifetime. In lessons, we introduce new books and old favorites, tell about authors and genres, read aloud authors and genres, talk with kids about reading rituals and plans, and teach about elements of fiction, how poems work, what efficient readers do and don’t do when they come across an unfamiliar word, how punctuation gives voice to reading, when to speed up or slow down, who won this year’s Newbery Award, how to keep reading records, what a sequel is, what readers can glean from a copyright page, how to identify the narrative voice or tone of a novel and why it matters, how there are different purposes for reading that affect a reader’s style and pace, how to identify a “beach book” or page turner, how to tell if a book is too hard, too easy, or just right, and why the only way to become a strong, fluent reader is to read often and a lot.

Reading workshop is one of the simplest and hardest things we do at CTL. It’s also the most worthwhile. Students leave our school as strong, literary, well-above-grade-level readers. But they also leave smarter about such a diversity of words, ideas, events, people, and places that they take their teachers’ breaths away. Books and stories bring the whole world to a tiny school in rural Maine. And then the readers grow up, leave the school, and recognize the wide world they encounter out there because it is already lodged in the “chambers of their imaginations” (Spufford, 2002).

Sydney Jourard wrote, “The vicarious experience of reading can shape our essence, change us, just as firsthand experience can. Experience seems to be as transfusible as blood” (1971). For kids who know reading as a personal art, every day is a transfusion. Every day they engage with literature that enables them to know things, feel things, imagine things, hope for things, become people they never could have dreamed without the transforming power of books, books, books.

All of the boys and girls at our school help their teachers create master lists, organized by grade level and gender, of the inviting, accessible books that they’ve loved best. These “Kids Recommend” lists feature the titles that our students name in response to this question: What books do you love so much that you think they might convince a _____-grade girl/boy—someone who’s a lot like you, except that she/he doesn’t read much—that books are great? The answers are available to our students and their parents, as well as other teachers and the general public, here at our school’s website. The CTL "Kids Recommend" lists average over 400 hits each week.

Students update the lists continuously, because the field of children’s literature changes so quickly. While a handful of titles do maintain their popularity (S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (1968), the novel that virtually created the field of young adult literature, continues to speak to kids), most drop off and are replaced over time.

We separated the lists of book titles that appear on the “Kids Recommend” page for grades 3-8 into girls’ choices and boys’ choices because, in general, their tastes in books aren’t the same: at the middle-school level, the gender overlap in titles is only about twenty percent; in grades 3-4, it’s around seventeen percent. Gender seems not to be an issue in book choice in K-2.

We hope that CTL's book lists will set a trend. Our ultimate goal is a national network of websites of great titles, nominated by K-12 students who choose their own books in all kinds of school settings: the favorite titles each year of a cross-section of American kids as the go-to resource for teachers to select literature for classroom libraries in diverse communities across America.

If you are interested in learning more about how we teach reading in a workshop at CTL, I have written a brief, practical book for teachers and parents entitled The Reading Zone: How to Help Kids Become Skilled, Passionate, Habitual, Critical Readers (2007). It describes the specifics of the methodology we call reading workshop, and you can order it from Amazon.com, Borders, Barnes and Noble, or directly from the publisher at Scholastic.com.

With all best wishes,
Nancie Atwell

Kindergarten