Absolutely! I’d love to see the curriculum stretch beyond “the classics,” and present a wider world-view instead. If there are only so many books you can cover in middle school and high school as assigned reading, I don’t see any reason why half of those books shouldn’t be authored by females, and with a wide range of cultures represented. In fact, with all of your great curated lists I’d be curious to know what your ideal book list would be for assigned school reading for grades 6 through 12, though I’m sure that would be ever-changing with current events in mind.

Fantastic advice, Jennifer — I really love how thoughtful you’ve been with your kids in your efforts to keep them reading!

I would add homework and assigned reading to the challenges of high school. My girls both stopped reading for pleasure because of time and the abundance of boring assigned books. I really wish I could get HS English teachers to rethink some of / most of their required reading texts. In my opinion, kids can still analyze and interpret text in more relevant, highly interesting books by female and BiPOC authors — but my kids aren’t getting those kinds of innovative, forward-thinking teachers. It’s still primarily (only) the supposed canon of dead white guys. (End rant.)

Thanks for sharing, Joan!

Last spring at the start of the pandemic I started reading aloud the first Harry Potter book to all of my kids (a series he’d read on his own when he was about 9) and I found that when I’d get the book out that he didn’t disappear to the shower or head to bed, but he seemed to have a nostalgia for the books and was really engaged in listening to the story even if he was pretending he wasn’t. I started working my reading times around his school and work schedule (without mentioning this to him of course) so that he wouldn’t miss anything good. And sure enough, he has been right there with us as we’re reading our way through the books now. Right now we’re on book #4 (and he also listened to the series Ivy Pocket when we read it as well.)

Several months ago I also started picking up comic books for him at the library–as in compilations and treasuries of regular newspaper comics that I would have read myself as a teen in the 90s. He won’t pick up a typical comic book or graphic novel but he will easily laugh through a book of Zits or Fox Trot. He also enjoyed Nathan Pyle’s Strange Planet books. He doesn’t read much other than comics, plus listening in on our chapter books, but all things considered he’s “read” more this year than in the past 3 years combined.

I’ve actually been thinking a lot about this lately (as he’s close to his high school graduation–about a month away!) and I think I can pinpoint one thing I do wish I’d done differently with reading with him, that I’m now doing with my younger kids. Sure, there’s the phone issue I mentioned, but sometimes that’s a losing battle with teens and pre-teens anyway. But I wish I’d gotten more “just for fun” books for him when he was an older middle schooler. He’d gone through Harry Potter and Five Kingdoms and other big fantasy and adventure books at that point and I think as he got older that some of those bigger books were just too much–too many pages? too much of a commitment?–when he had a lot of other things competing for his time.

With one of my younger sons, a middle schooler now, I get a variety of books to have around the house so there are plenty of choices of “bite sized” books around that aren’t “too much.” So for us that’s comics like Garfield and Zits, and graphic novels geared towards 2nd and 3rd graders, and history graphic novels about things he’s studying in school, and car magazines and joke books–anything that be digested in the 10 minutes before the bus arrives or while the lasagna cools. My 13-year-old usually has many books going at once–a couple of big chapter books, a comic book, a graphic novel, and some non-fiction. He doesn’t always finish books but that’s okay. I’m just happy that he’s reading for the joy of it!

[And a couple of other things I thought of while I was typing this:

–I like to pick up non-fiction books about my teens’ hobbies–those are always appealing, even if just to flip through. For my oldest that has been architecture and Legos, my 13-year-old son that is vehicles and wars and reptiles.
–My 15-year-old daughter is a BIG reader, and she likes to do the yearly reading challenge on Goodreads and sometimes she’ll add her review of a book. (Her goal is 150 books this year! It’s fun for her to keep track of her books that way and since we’re big library users it helps her to remember books she’s read.]

Thanks for all of your great posts and ideas!

Sometimes the right tools can also make a big difference in enticing kids to read and learn with more success. For physical and digital aids that offer helpful support, your readers may be interested in taking a look at the Reading Focus Cards’ tools and apps. To learn more, please visit https://www.focusandread.com.

Thanks again for another excellent article to help many parents encourage kids to read and learn more effectively!