Dear Families,

Several of you have asked for ideas for books that your advanced reader may enjoy. As a parent of an advanced reader, I know the difficulty in finding books written at your reader's independent reading level while still containing appropriate content. Hopefully some of these ideas will help you.

Madeline L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time trilogy by Madeline L'Engle

The Deltora Quest series, by Emily Rodda.

Mary Pope Osborne's series of books based on Homer's Odyssey: Tales from the Odyssey (there are 5 in all).

Mythomania series by Kate McMullen (funny books based on characters from Greek mythology, with Hades as the narrator).

Eragon & Eldest by Christopher Paolini

Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis

The Dear America and Royal Diaries series published by Scholastic are quality historical fiction.

Ann of Green Gables books by L.M. Montgomery

The Alchemyst by Michael Scott

Many of these are are fantasy books, which have been shown to have the most advanced vocabulary of any of the genres.

These are a couple of websites with other ideas. We will be reading a few of these in class this year.

 www.kidsreads.com/lists/adv-new.asp

www.brockvillelibrary.ca/article2007-1.pdf

Checking for the list of Newbery Award-Winning Books is another good idea as well as previous year's lists of Sunshine State Books for the middle school level.

In addition, I suggest having students branch out to other genres. Biographies are often overlooked by students and can be very engaging and interesting. Non-fiction books on topics of their interest are great, too.