In the last few months I regaled you with recommended read-aloud lists categorized by age. I said that those titles were only a few of the many excellent ones out there. I’d like to add to them now by posting our “required reading” list. These are all books either required by the language arts curriculum that we used, or were required by me because I felt they were important to read.
Because there are so many worthy books and not enough time, we only studied excerpts from some of the high school books and read some others straight through. But here they are, labeled by the grade in which they were read.
3rd Grade:
The White Stallion by Elizabeth Shub
Madeleine by Ludwig Bemelmans
Meet George Washington by Joan Heilbroner
The Courage of Sarah Noble by Alice Dalgliesh
4th Grade:
The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner
Wilbur and Orville Wright: Young Fliers by Augusta Stevenson
Benjamin Franklin: Young Printer by Augusta Stevenson
The Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth George Speare
Favorite Poems Old and New by Helen Ferris
5th Grade:
Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Trumpet of the Swan by E.B. White
Meet Addy by Connie Porter
Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink
6th Grade:
Carry On, Mr. Bowditch by Jean Lee Latham
The Bronze Bow by Elizabeth George Speare
Big Red by Jim Kjelgaard
The Horse and His Boy by C.S. Lewis
7th Grade:
The Star of Light by Patricia St. John
Adam and His Kin by Ruth Beechick
Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare
8th Grade:
Across Five Aprils by Irene Hunt
A Lantern in Her Hand by Bess Streeter Aldrich
Eric Liddell by Catherine Swift
God’s Smuggler by Brother Andrew
When the Banks Closed, We Opened Our Hearts by Mike Beno
We Pulled Together…And Won by Deb Mulvey
Spiritual Lives of the Great Composers by Patrick Kavanaugh
9th Grade:
Holt Anthology of Science Fiction
The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White
Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne
10th Grade:
The Epic of Gilgamesh
11th Grade:
The Train-of-Thought Writing Method: Practical, User-Friendly Help for Beginning
Writers by Kathi Macias
Of Plymouth Plantation: Bradford’s History of the Plymouth Settlement 1608-1650 by
William Bradford
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Stephen Crane
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
12th Grade:
Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
Emma by Jane Austen
Silas Marner by George Eliot
The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The 5,000-Year Leap by W. Cleon Skousen
The Making of America by W. Cleon Skousen
Whatever Happened to Penny Candy? by Richard J. Maybury
The Jackrabbit Factor by Leslie Householder
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