Middle grade chapter books for kids ages 9 through 14 and including 3rd grade books, 4th grade books, 5th grade books, 6th grade books, and 7th grade books.
My 5th grade son is assigned more reading homework than my 8th grade daughter. He is supposed to read 30 minutes a day; my daughter just 2 hours a week. At my son’s Curriculum Night, his teacher explained that reading just 20 minutes a day dramatically increases a child’s vocabulary. Hence, she assigns them 30 minutes a…
PickyKidPix skipped her club soccer practice so we could see Lynda Mullaly Hunt’s author visit for Understanding Our Differences. Her sister, Grasshopper and Sensei, had the pleasure of hearing Lynda Mullaly Hunt speak to her middle school two years ago. She hadn’t even read her book but she raved about how Lynda was an inspiring and…
This is my third year judging for the Cybils and I don’t dare compare it to the Caldecott or Newbery awards but I wonder if there is the same dynamic that we have in deciding a winner. For the Cybils, we work off of a short list that is presented to us by first-round judges…
Censorship makes me angry (but many things do) and it tends to make me go on the offensive. Instead of my diatribe, I found some words of wisdom by authors on how to handle censorship. Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance. Most of the censorship I see is fear-driven. I…
PickyKidPix helped me organize my children’s books a few years ago. We made a special sticker designation for our collection of Roald Dahl books. She loved Dahl when she was in third grade and she read nearly exclusively from his books for that entire year. Grasshopper and Sensei also read quite a few Roald Dahl books,…
Thank goodness that school has not started for us yet. My son loves Percy Jackson and has read every word Rick Riordan has ever written and he would have lugged the latest Percy Jackson Greek Hereos book back and forth to school every single day until he finished it. That would be a feat for…
I have to applaud Rick Riordan for consciously creating casts of characters of color starting with his Percy Jackson series, particularly his Heroes of Olympus and Kane Chronicle series. Does it make a difference to see yourself in a book? I think so. Does a multi-ethnic cast of characters help a series go supernova? It…