Approaching Summer

Amidst reading aloud Holly Keller's Farfallina and Marcel today, my teaching partner and I worked on summer reading lists. Just the other day, a fourth grader asked me if theirs was finished yet. Not quite, I told her. Why? Well, I just love to read the lists, she answered. With an older brother and younger sister, she was glad their house would have three lists.

We are nearing the end of each list. The fifth grade list had room for one more title, so I added the title I like to include every year on their: The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg (which, by the way, will have an incredible release in the fall with fourteen authors' versions of the stories, including Sherman Alexie, M.T. Anderson, Kate DiCamillo, Cory Doctorow, Jules Feiffer, Stephen King, Tabitha King, Lois Lowry, Gregory Maguire, Walter Dean Myers, Linda Sue Park, Louis Sachar, Jon Scieszka, Lemony Snicket, and Chris Van Allsburg). The fourth grade needs a few more nonfiction titles, one of which will be David Aguilar's Super Stars. Poetry and nonfiction need to be added to the third grade list. Second grade needs a few more early chapter books; we added Marion Dane Bauer's The Golden Ghost as one of those. For first graders, we need to add more nonfiction also. The kindergarten list is almost done; they love Eric Kimmel's Anansi stories, so we added Anansi and the Magic Stick.

If we complete them tomorrow, we can step away for a few days before proof-reading. And in a few weeks, we will pass them to children and post them on our website, ready for the approaching summer.