It may surprise you, it did me, that more school age kids read To Kill a Mocking Bird than the Harry Potter books last year — although it’s not holding true today on the Amazon.com website (I just checked).
As published in Shelf Awarness today:
Wonder what all the other kids are reading these days? The Washington Post reported that the Renaissance Learning report, What Kids Are Reading, “calculated the books most read by more than 3 million schoolchildren last year.” You can see the complete list at the Post, but the number one titles by category include:
- Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss (first grade)
- If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff (second grade)
- Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White (third grade)
- Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume (fourth grade)
- Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson (fifth grade)
- Hatchet by Gary Paulsen (sixth grade)
- The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton (seventh and eighth grades)
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (ninth through twelfth grade)
If you look on the ratings on Amazon.com for various books (kind of the only non-scientific way to gauge on a daily basis how books are selling) you find Dr. Seuss holding his own day-in-and-day-out for years. It’s getting to be that time to stock up on summer reading for the kids!
Award-winning author Helen Hemphill has written a historical fiction novel for Middle Schoolers. The Adventurous Deeds of Deadwood Jones (Front Street, Boyds Mills Press)will especially grab the attention of those sometimes tough-to-reach Middle School boys. The book is inspired by the real-life African-American cowboy Nat Love. Check out the YouTube book trailer. It’s only been up for two days, but folks from all over the country are emailing and saying they LOVE it!
Helen has a special promotion on her website www.helenhemphill.com. You can enter a drawing to win a signed first-edition copy of the book (which doesn’t actually come out until November, 2008) and a $25 iTunes gift card — she’s having 4 drawings, so enter now and enter often!
There is also a promotion in which Middle Tennessee schools or homeschool groups of 25 or more can contact julie@jkscommunications.com to order the book early for a summer book pick or for a fall all-class read and Helen will personalize the books (either before they are sent or when she visits) and she will visit the students in the fall to talk about the book. We’re getting lots of great feedback from teachers and homeschool parent leaders about this!