What’s happening in the library?

Holidays, whether spent at home or traveling, are a perfect time for reading.

Need some suggestions?

I’ve prepared a couple of lists — Great Reads for lower primary students and upper primary students — which are available in the library as a pamphlet and as a PDF download.

The two groupings are only a general guideline; children in lower primary might find books on the upper primary list both accessible and interesting, and upper primary students might read books on the lower primary list with great pleasure. Ease and enjoyment are the main reading goals.

I teach students to use the 5-Finger Test (by which they count the number of words they don’t know on a random page to determine if a book may be too hard for them to read easily).

Some websites allow you to search for children’s books by age or grade level (where 2.3 would mean 3 months into Grade 2, and 5.1 would be the first month of Grade 5):

• Book Hive — this US site has a great “Find a Book” feature. Use their Advanced Search function to search for books by either age (K-Grade 3 or Grades 4 – 6), genre, or even number of pages!
• Mrs. Mad’s Book-a-Rama – a UK website devoted to children’s books, including news, reviews, recommendations, games, etc., as well as a Search the Bookshelf function based on age and genre
• BookWink — a US website that allows you to search for books by Subject, Grade Level, Author, or Title
• Scholastic’s Teacher Book Wizard — lets you search for books by grade level or interest level

However, use those age/grade levels recommendations with caution! Philip Pullman, author of the best-selling trilogy “His Dark Materials”, has recently started a campaign against publishers labeling books with recommended ages of readers. As he and other authors argue,

• Each child is unique, and so is each book. Accurate judgments about age suitability are impossible, and approximate ones are worse than useless.
• Everything about a book is already rich with clues about the sort of reader it hopes to find – jacket design, typography, cover copy, prose style, illustrations. These are genuine connections with potential readers, because they appeal to individual preference. An age-guidance figure is a false one, because it implies that all children of that age are the same.

There was a recent column in the Times (UK) on the controversy titled “Judge a book by its cover: Publishers give us plenty of clues to a title’s target audience; we don’t need read-by dates as well“, as well as another in the Telegraph (UK).

Please consider the Rights of the Reader, as proposed by Daniel Pennac, an award-winning French author for children and adults, in his book, Comme un Roman, which discusses how to raise children as readers. (Note: there are three English translations: Better Than Life, Reads Like a Novel, and The Rights of the Reader.)

The right not to read

The right to skip pages

The right not to finish

The right to reread

The right to read anything

The right to escapism

The right to read anywhere

The right to browse

The right to read out loud

The right to not defend your tastes