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Middle School Book Rooms

Page history last edited by PBworks 15 years, 9 months ago

 

Are you interested in creating a middle school book room or adding to a classroom library?

 

This page offers resources, book suggestions, and student reviews of genres and books that are beneficial to middle school students.

 

 

Teacher Resources                

 

Should We Burn Babar? by Herbert Kohl

 

This book has a selection of essays written by Herbert Kohl that asks educators and parents to carefully examine what is being read to their children and what is being read by their children both at home and at school.  The essays focus on what do Babar, the elephant, a French book series, specifically teach our children, what do different versions of fairytales teach, how are historical facts presented in textbooks, and a plea for radical literature. The focus of radical literature is on the community (a neighborhood) as a main character in conflict and how this community uses friendship and love to come to a resolution.  Examples of this type of writing include:  Virginia Hamilton’s, The Planet of Junior Brown for the middle grades, Vera Williams’s trilogy, A Chair for My Mother, Something Special for Me, and Music, Music Everywhere for the elementary grades, and The Autobiography of Mother Jones for high school and adults.  Again, in each of these books there is a focus on how communities work together using friendship to overcome their struggles with poverty and prejudice. Kohl’s  point is that more literature needs to be written this way and it is not.  This book does not give any specific suggestions in choosing adolescent literature.  It makes a teacher/parent/reader think more specifically about text selection.

 

Great Books for High School Kids edited by Rick Ayers and Amy Crawford

 

This book provides wonderful lists of books to be read by high school students.  The lists are divided into the following categories:  abuse and recovery, African-American experience, the African and Afro-Cuban experience, the Asian and Asian American experience, banned books, big fat books to take on a road trip, books made into good movies, books to take to the beach or on an airplane light and fast, books with laughter in the title, chick books, childhood stories, comics and graphic novels, coming of age and growing up, cultural survival, the cycle of violence, death, drama, enemies, essays that change teens' lives, European fiction, families, fathers and sons, feminist, fictional war stories, friends, gay, queer, lesbian, and transgender, gotta laugh to keep from crying, great books contemplating existentialist questions, great characters, guy books, historical novels, history remade, hubris and nemesis, interesting pair reads, investigative reporting, fated futures, journey to adulthood, just crazy, Chicano, Latino, Latin-American experience, legacies, loners, love, magical realism, memoirs, Middle East and South Asia, music and musicians, mysteries, Native American experience, nature writing, parallel universe and human experience, parents, philosophy, poetry, political struggle for freedom, fiction/nonfiction, religion, science/ecology/cosmology, science fiction and fantasy, sex, short books/quick reads, short stories, siblings, the South, spiritual journeys, sports, talking back, teenage alienation/rebellion, true war stories, and urban gritties.

    Not only does it include an extensive list of books, it also includes chapters that focus on teachers’ experiences with specific categories of literature.  These chapters focus on the following categories:  overcoming childhood, finding one’s future in the past, the dangers of a book, fated futures, spiritual journeys, culture and survival, true war stories.

    I also enjoyed this book because the introduction discusses the definition of what makes a great book.  It helped my create my own definition of a great book.  I do not necessarily think that a great book has to be a timeless classic.  A great book is a piece of literature a person loves and that book also changes his/her life in some way.   From this definition, I was able to create the following list and summaries of books that we need to have in our middle school classrooms.

 

Book List          

 

Leon’s Story by Leon Tillage

    This is a nonfiction book that was written based on the oral histories of Leon Tillage.  It is about an African-American boy growing up from the 1930s thought the 1960s in Raleigh and the surrounding areas.

 

 

Bang! By Sharon G. Flake

    This is a fictional book about an African-American teenager dealing with the death of his brother and other people in his neighborhood.  He is reaching an age where he is making poor decisions.  His father gives him the ultimate test in survival.

 

 

Who Am I Without Him? by Sharon G. Flake

    This is a collection of short stories about teenage girls and the relationships that they have with boys.  There is a story in here that every teenage boy and girl has experienced.

 

 

Bronx Masquerade by Nikki Grimes

    This is a fictional book about a group of teenagers growing up and attending high school in the Bronx. A teacher discovers that he can relate to his students best through poetry.  Each chapter is a character sharing his/her viewpoint about what is going on in their lives.

 

 

Miracle’s Boys by Jacqueline Woodson

    This is about a young living in the ‘hood who has to raise his two school age brothers.  His mother died a few years ago and he dropped out of school in order to raise his two little brothers so they would not be put in foster care.

 

 

The Circuit by Francisco Jimenez

    This is a fictional account of a young boy whose parents are migrant workers.

 

 

Voices from the Field by Various Authors

    This is a nonfiction book of personal accounts of children growing up with parents who are migrant workers.  It also includes poems written in Spanish reflecting on their life experiences as well as photographs that show the way these families live.

 

 

Esperanza Rising by Pam Munoz Ryan

    This is a fictional story about a young girl named Esperanza who once wealthy family is forced to move from Mexico to California in the late 1920s.  This happens to this young girl as she is approaching her teenage years.  She is forced into migrant work, but still dreams of her quincaenera.

 

 

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez

    This is a fictional story about four young women who move from the Dominican Republic to the United States.  They are struggling with adjusting to life as American teenagers and dealing with a mother who hold on to their rich Dominican culture.

 

 

When I Was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago

    This is a story about a young girl who moves from Puerto Rico to the United States.  It focuses on her teenage years living in New York City.

 

 

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

    This is a fictional story about a grown man reflecting on growing up in Afghanistan.  Now that he has moved to the United States, he wonders what happened to a childhood friend.  He returns to see just how much has changed in Afghanistan.

 

 

Homeless Bird by Gloria Thalen

    This is a fictional story of a teenager living in India.  It deals with the traditions surrounding arranged marriages and what happens to a young woman who has become a widow.

 

 

I’m Late by Mari Evans

    This is a short novel about two teenage girls who become pregnant.  The novel focuses on how the girls feel about being pregnant.  It also looks at how their lives have changed as a result of being a pregnant teenager.

 

Student Recommendations

 

The following webpages created by a sixth grade student include two book recommendations for the Walter Dean Myers' books, Slam and Monster.

 

Web Address for Slamhttp://freewebs.com/sduns011

 

Web Address for Monsterhttp://freewebs.com/sdunson/index.htm

 

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