Curriculum Details: Literature
Students in all grades read a wide variety of printed material: books, magazines, newspapers, and original source material. The youngest students read nursery rhymes, traditional and adapted. Children in the primary and intermediate grades read fables and fairy tales, particularly as they relate to the social studies curricula. American tall tales are stressed in the third grade. All students read poetry, biographies, non-fiction, and plays.
A wide variety of reading material, primarily novels, is available in full classroom sets from grades one through eight. Literature and language arts lessons revolve around this reading material. Under teacher supervision, students read, discuss, write about, and do projects related to these books. In grades one through four, children are exposed to an eclectic mix of excellent children's literature. An additional focus is placed on books that relate to the students' social studies curriculum or other areas of study. In grades five through eight, the literature corresponds mainly to the social studies curricula, but also includes a variety of classic literature for young adults.
A sampling of the titles, classified by grade level, follows.
Grade 1 The World Around Us
* denotes class set of books
# denotes a book that is an option to be read, but may not be read every year
Ongoing
- Junior Great Books* read-aloud series
- Phonics* workbook
- Scholastic News* magazine
- Story time of chapter books (examples: The Magic Tree House series, books by Roald Dahl, The Little Prince)
September
Welcome to First Grade!
- Morris Goes to School
- Friends by Helme Heine
- When Kangaroo Goes to School
- Never Ride an Elephant to School
Social Studies Connections: Books about Names
- Chrysanthemum
- Andy, That’s My Name
- My Name is Johari
- The Name Jar
- Alma and How She Got Her Name
Social Studies Connections: Books about the World
- What a Wonderful World*#
- Me on the Map
- My Global Address
Robert McCloskey books
- Blueberries for Sal*
- Make Way for Ducklings*
Science Connections: Books about Plants
- How the Forest Grew
- The Tiny Seed
- From Seed to Sunflower
Science/Math Connections: Books about Ladybugs
- Ladybug Life Cycle
- Little Buggy
- Spotted Beetles
- Ladybug on the Move
- Are You a Ladybug?
- The Very Lazy Ladybug
- The Grouchy Ladybug
October
Social Studies Connections: Books about Homes
- This is My House*
- A House is a House For Me*
- The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig*#
- The Little House
- A House for Hermit Crab
Social Studies Connections: Indigenous Peoples Day
- We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga
Science/Math Connections: Books about Pumpkins
- A Day at the Pumpkin Patch
- Pumpkin Circle
- Pumpkins by Ray (fiction)
- Pumpkins by Gibbons (nonfiction)
- Pumpkin Jack
- How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin?
Halloween Books
November
Science Connections: Books about Plants
- Red Leaf, Yellow Leaf
- Leaf Man
- Autumn Leaves
- A Tree for All Seasons
Social Studies Connections: Books about North America
- The Goat in the Rug*
- The Three Little Javelinas* (fiction)
- Don’t Call Me Pig: A Javelina’s Story
- The Pig That is Not a Pig (nonfiction)
- Boreguita and the Coyote*#
- The Legend of the Bluebonnet*#
- Diego*#
- Whale in the Sky
- How Raven Stole the Sun
Writing Connections: Books about Letter Writing
- Toot and Puddle
- Splat Says Thank You
- The Post Office Book (nonfiction)
- The Jolly Postman
- Millie Waits for the Mail
December
Flat Stanley (first chapter book)*
Books by Felicia Bond including
- If You Give a Mouse a Cookie#
- If You Give a Pig a Pancake#
- If You Give a Cat a Cupcake#
Social Studies Connections: Books about South America
- Sailing to the Galapagos
- The Great Kapok Tree*
- Rainforest Secrets*
- Rainforest (big book)
- If I Ran the Rainforest
- On the Pampas
- The Lost City: Machu Picchu
Science Connections: Books about Matter
- Hot Air Henry
- What is the World Made Of?
Winter Holiday Books
January
Social Studies Connections: Books about Europe
- A New Coat for Anna*
- The Mysterious Giant of Barletta*
- The Story of Ferdinand*
- Sleeping Ugly*
- The Littlest Matryoshka
- Angus in Paris
- Various Grimm fairy tales
Science Connections: Books about Earth Materials
- Diary of a Worm
- Hill of Fire*
- Volcanoes
- Pedro’s Rocks
- Dave's Down to Earth Rock Shop
Books about Martin Luther King Jr.
- Martin’s Big Words
- Martin Luther King
Books about Friendship
- I’m Not Oscar’s Friend Anymore*
- Don’t Squeal Unless It’s a Big Deal#
- A Bad Case of Tattle Tongue#
February
Books about Friendship
- Esio Trot*
- The Enormous Crocodile*#
- Amos and Boris*#
- The Hundred Dresses*#
Social Studies Connections: Books about Africa
- Anansi and the Moss Covered Rock*
- Galimoto*
- It Takes a Village*#
- The Egyptian Cinderella*#
- Kofi and His Magic
- Bill and Pete/Bill and Pete Go Down the Nile
- One Plastic Bag
- Wangari's Trees of Peace
Social Studies Connections: Books about Abraham Lincoln
- Abe Lincoln’s Hat
- Abe Lincoln: The Boy Who Loved Books
Science Connections: Books about Earth Materials
- Rocks in His Head
- When Clay Sings
- If You Find a Rock
- If You Are a Hunter of Fossils
- The Fossil Girl: Mary Anning's Dinosaur Discovery
- A Dinosaur Named Sue
- When Dinosaurs Came With Everything
- Boy Were We Wrong About Dinosaurs
Math Connections: Books about 100
- G is for Googol (sections therein)
- Can You Count to a Googol?
- One Hundred Hungry Ants
- One Hundred Days of School
- 100th Day Worries
- The Very Rich Lady and the One Hundred Dogs
March
Social Studies Connections: Books about Asia
- The Rumor: A Jataka Tale from India
- Gandhi: A March to the Sea
- Every Day is Malala Day
- A Grain of Rice*
- One Grain of Rice
- I Live in Tokyo
- A Carp for Kimiko
- Crow Boy*
- The Firekeeper’s Son
- Grandfather Tang's Story
Books About Inclusion
- We Are Alike, We Are Different
- Imogene’s Antlers
- The Sneetches
- Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed#
- The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo*#
April
Miss Rumphius* (connection to Earth Day)
Science Connections: Books about Eggs and Chicks
- First the Egg
- The Hen Can’t Help It
- Chick: Watch Me Grow
- Tillie Lays an Egg
- Chickens Aren’t the Only Ones
- Chicken Big
- The Chicken Sisters
- The Hoboken Chicken Emergency
- Chick Life Cycle*
Social Studies Connections: Books about Australia
- Possum Magic*
- Top to Bottom Down Under
- My Grandma Lived in Gooligulch
- Marsupial Sue
- Big Rain Coming
- The Sign of the Seahorse
- Here is the Coral Reef
- Edward the Emu
- Edwina the Emu
- Punga the Goddess of Ugly
May
Social Studies Connections: Books about Antarctica
- A Tale of Antarctica*
- Pinkie Leaves Home
- Without You
- And Tango Makes Three
- Penguins
- Trapped by the Ice
- Antarctica: A True Book
Science Connections: Books About Insects
- A Butterfly is Patient
- The Butterfly Counting Book
- Animal Defenses
- Monarch and Milkweed
- The Very Hungry Caterpillar
- Butterfly House
- Busy Honeybees#
Chapter Book Chosen from the following:
- The Chocolate Touch*#
- Catwings*#
- Catwings Return*#
- The Mouse and the Motorcycle*#
- A Bear Called Paddington*#
June
Writing Connections: Poetry
- Something Big Has Been Here*
Social Studies Connection
- My Granny Went to Market, A Round-the-World Counting Rhyme
- The Long Way to a New Land*#
- The Long Way Westward*#
Grade 2
Ongoing: Junior Great Books
Scholastic News
Read Alouds:
- Frindle
- Shiloh
- The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane
Novel Studies:
- Bunnicula
- Take a Stand Rosa Parks!
- Helen Keller
- Fairy Tales and Fables
- Riding Freedom
- Charlotte's Web
Grade 3
Ongoing: Junior Great Books
Scholastic News
Read Alouds:
- One Crazy Summer
- Louisiana's Way Home
- Blended
- A Fish Out of Water
Novel Studies (projects included with each novel in Quarters 2 through 4)
- Raymie Nightingale
- Mr. Tucket
- The One and Only Ivan
- Bud, Not Buddy
- Who Is? series focusing on biographies of women in history
- A Wrinkle in Time
Grade 4
Ongoing: Junior Great Books
Science World
- Love That Dog (corresponds with poetry residency)
- Because of Winn-Dixie
- Kira Kira
- The Watsons Go to Birmingham
- Chasing Vermeer
Student Choice Novel Groups
- Walk Two Moons
- The Mixed Up Files of Basil E. Frankweiler
- Clarice Bean Spells Trouble
Includes Quarter 1, 2, and 3 Choice Book Reports
- student-selected books
- projects based on the following categories: art, music, word, and number/technology
Grade 5
Ongoing: Junior Great Books
Scholastic Junior
- Number the Stars and The Yellow Star: the Legend of King Christian X of Denmark
- Wonder (read aloud)
- Front Desk by Kelly Yang (read aloud)
- Jerry Spinelli author study choices: Loser, Eggs, The Library Card, Wringer, Hokey Pokey, Milkweed, and Crash
- "A Game of Catch" by Richard Wilbur
- Coraline
- The War That Saved My Life (read aloud)
- "Thank you Ma'am" by Langston Hughes
- Langston Hughes poetry unit
- Maniac Magee
- The Jungle Book (excerpts) by Rudyard Kipling
- Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes
- When You Reach Me (read aloud)
- Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson (read aloud)
- Eleven by Evelyn Cisneros
- Still I Rise by Maya Angelou
- Other Worlds literature circle choices: The Endless Steppe, The Trumpeter of Krakow, A Single Shard, and The Master Puppeteer
- "The Tale of the Three Storytellers" by James Kruss
- Red Scarf Girl
- Flora and Ulysses (read aloud)
- Hatchet
- One Thousand Paper Cranes: The Story of Sadako and the Children's Peace Statue (read aloud)
- "The Happy Prince" by Oscar Wilde
- Knucklehead: Tall Tales and Almost True Stories of Growing Up (read aloud)
- A Bone from a Dry Sea
- Animal Farm
- Touching Spirit Bear
- An Introduction to Shakespeare
- Romeo & Juliet
- Julius Caesar
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream
- Catherine Called Birdy
- The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen
- Mythology Tales from World Epics
Grade 7
September
Short Stories: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Frank Stockton
Philosophy: Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Marcus Aurelius
Excerpts: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jane Austen, Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, Joyce Carol Oates, Oscar Wilde, William Shakespeare, Ambrose Bierce, Ogden Nash, Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, Margaret Atwood, John Dryden, Dorothy Parker, E.E. Cummings, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Samuel Johnson, Lord Byron, Evelyn Waugh, John Donne, D.H. Lawrence, Charlotte Bronte, Wilfred Owen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Jhumpa Lahiri, Amy Tan, Lord Tennyson, Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson
October
Short Stories: Guy de Maupassant, Joseph Conrad, Anton Chekhov, Ambrose Bierce
Philosophy: Moses Maimonides, John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, Martin Luther King
Excerpts: Stephen Crane, George Saunders, Thomas Gray, Charlotte Bronte, Ethan Wharton, William Blake, Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, Countee Cullen, Dorothy Parker, Robert Browning, Sophocles, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wilkie Collins, George Orwell, Jonathan Swift, William Makepeace Thackery, Sharon Olds, W.H. Auden, Emily Dickinson, Margaret Atwood
November
Short Stories: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Saki, Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane
Philosophy: Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Heidegger, Zeno, Aristotle
Excerpts: William Blake, John Keats, William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Martin Luther King, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Walter Ralegh, James Joyce, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Gray, Langston Hughes, Jane Austen, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, Stephen Crane, Charlotte Bronte, Jhumpa Lahiri, Jonathan Swift, Gwendolyn Brooks, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A.E. Housman
December
Short Stories: Katherine Mansfield, Jack London, Willa Sibert Cather, O. Henry
Philosophy: Rene Descartes, George Bishop Berkeley, David Hume, Immanuel Kant
Excerpts: William Blake, Lord Tennyson, George Orwell, William Butler Yeats, Stephen Crane, William Shakespeare, Richard Wilbur, Philip Larkin, Mary Shelley, Ben Jonson, Philip Levine, William Faulkner, Elizabeth Bishop
January
Short Stories: James Joyce, Susan Glaspell, Franz Kafka, Richard Connell
Philosophy: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertrand Russell, Daniel Dennett
Excerpts: James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, E.M. Forster, Jack London, Donald Hall, John Updike, Jane Austen, Pam Houston, Wilfred Owen, Doris Lessing, Shirley Jackson, Daniel Keyes, Thornton Wilder, William Faulkner, Alice Hoffman
February
Short Stories: D.H. Lawrence, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, William Carlos Williams
Poetry: William Blake, Lord Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, W.H. Auden, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Theodore Roethke, William Butler Yeats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Wordsworth, William Shakespeare, Walter Ralegh, Robert Hayden
Philosophy: Parmenides, Democritus, Plato, Aristotle
Excerpts: Gish Jen, Jane Austen, Katherine Mansfield
March
Short Stories: James Thurber, Shirley Jackson, Vladimir Nabokov, Ray Bradbury
Poetry: William Blake, William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Lord Tennyson, William Butler Yeats, John Keats, Stevie Smith, Robert Herrick, Robert Browning, Edgar Allan Poe, Derek Wolcott, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walt Whitman, Thomas Hardy, Countee Cullen, Donald Justice, Alexander Pope, Robert Lowell
Philosophy: St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes
Excerpts: Charlotte Bronte, William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Frank O’Connor, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, Arthur Miller, Flannery O’Connor, Amy Tan, Samuel Beckett, Jane Austen, Stephen Crane, Henrik Ibsen
April
Short Stories: Isaac Asimov, Flannery O’Connor, Roald Dahl, Doris Lessing
Poetry: E.E. Cummings, Michael Drayton, John Keats, William Shakespeare
Philosophy: Georg Hegel
Excerpts: Flannery O’Connor, Robert Browning, James Joyce, W.H. Auden, William Shakespeare, William Blake, Tim O’Brien, Carolyn Fourche
May
Short Stories: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, John Updike, Tillie Olsen, Ursula K. Le Guin
Excerpts: Edgar Allan Poe, Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Herman Melville, James Baldwin, Shirley Jackson, Tillie Olsen, T.S. Eliot
June
Short Stories: Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Alice Walker, Neil Gaiman
Grade 8
Short Stories
- “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”--Ernest Hemingway
- “Hills like White Elephants”--Ernest Hemingway
- “Indian Camp”--Ernest Hemingway
- “The Doll’s House”--Katherine Mansfield
- “A Hunger Artist”--Franz Kafka
- “The Lottery”--Shirley Jackson
- “A Good Man is Hard to Find”--Flannery O’Connor
- “I Stand Here Ironing”--Tillie Olsen
- “The Lottery in Babylon”--Jorge Luis Borges
- “The Aleph”--Jorge Luis Borges
Drama
- “A Marriage Proposal”--Anton Chekhov
- “The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden”--Thornton Wilder
- “The Bald Soprano”--Eugene Ionesco
- “What Where”--Samuel Beckett
- “The Zoo Story”--Edward Albee
Novels
- The Catcher in the Rye--J.D. Salinger
- Lord of the Flies--William Golding
- Fahrenheit 451--Ray Bradbury
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time--Mark Haddon
- Speak--Laurie Halse Anderson
- Looking for Alaska--John Green
- The Perks of Being a Wallflower--Stephen Chbosky