This summer I really want to focus on building my classroom library for the upcoming school year. I have already done a lot of preliminary work on this– making lists, driving to every secondhand bookstore in the Athens area, raiding my parent’s house (and my friends parent’s houses) for those books that were so good that we asked our parents to buy them for us– but I still feel pretty lost.
I am teaching 7th grade this coming school year and I am really excited about it– I remember what a weird, emotional, dumb, intense, and pivotal year that was for me. Unfortunately for that same reason I am struggling to pick books that “fit” the year. I am struggling to decipher where the line is when it comes to more mature topics for students that age, and my own reading habits at that time are not helpful as I read almost exclusively high fantasy brick sized books about dragons (which I will be happy to supply to those that want them, but I feel like that will not be most students). In 7th grade I felt much older than I was. I felt like a lot of the realistic fiction labeled books talked down to me so I never read them. I wish that hadn’t been the case because in a lot of ways I was dealing with situations much older than I was and it might have been nice to have a book address some of that. But now as the adult in the room, I know that some kids just don’t want to read all that (sometimes you don’t want the dragon to be a metaphor for your broken home) and I know even more that some parents DO NOT want their kids reading all that. So I’ve found myself holding books up to some sort of weird morality scale of what is “allowed” to be read in 7th grade– oscilating between wanting to advocate for these books about uncomfortable truth and wanting to just rest on middle grades staples like Hatchet and protect myself from backlash. (For the record, I really like Hatchet, and my brother liked it even more so that is not a diss).
I have a few goals for this class:
1.) I want to read books that I wouldn’t pick for myself. This is something I am pretty used to doing as my reading habits are shaped by what is available at the public library at the time, but it’s still something I want to be actively thinking about.
2.) I want to better understand what makes a book “challenging.” Part of my list-making adventures has been trying to assign some sort of system to how “difficult” a book is. My school is very big into the lexile levels, but to be honest all of the lexile levels of the books I currently have are kind of the same (~around the 5th-6th grade level) and I wouldn’t consider most of those books to be comparable to one another at all. I want to be able to recommend books that appeal to my students’ interests but also books that are realistic for each student to practice their reading with.
3.) I want to have a system for putting books on my shelves and checking them out to students. I feel like this is a pretty basic goal, but I will be honest using my classroom space effectively is one of my weakest skills. I am so bad at sticking to an organization system. The last thing I want is to lose books or have them set out in a way that students can’t find what they are looking for.
4.) I want to learn about how other people incorporate independent reading in a consistent and meaningful way in the classroom.
I guess I will end this post with a reading/life update. I am currently moving and so I must go through the annual ritual of selling all of the furniture I bought on Facebook marketplace at the beginning of the year. There is an entire ecosystem of furniture in Athens that just gets bought and resold on Facebook every summer. I sold my dresser to a pretty rad looking biker woman who told me she just divorced her husband and was skipping town. I was sitting on the curb reading Legendborn while I waited for her to pull up with her truck. She told me the cover of the book looked badass and I told her that it in fact was a pretty badass book. I just finished Legendborn this morning (AHHHHHH!!!!) and I am about to start They Went Left. I was able to get a physical and an audiobook copy of They Went Left so I can continue to make progress while I drive to and from Goodwill and the dump looking for boxes. I have somehow already fallen behind, but I am hoping to be at least halfway through They Went Left by tonight so that I can get my flipgrids up.
Olivia's Blog 
Hey Olivia! I think you raise a lot of important thoughts and questions in your post, especially with figuring out what makes a book challenging. I have the same question for my classroom library. I feel like I don’t know how to match students with a book that is the appropriate difficulty level, and I feel like this is an important part of implementing independent reading in the classroom. I can easily say which books are more mature based on content and I see a clear difference between the handful of middle grades books that I’ve got and the rest of my classroom library, but past that, I don’t know how to decide if a book is the right level for students. This is definitely something that I hope to think about some more this summer and maybe figure out before the school year starts. As far as building a 7th grade classroom library goes, I have no clue what 7th graders read now, but to maybe give you a few book recommendations, I know that I read The Hunger Games, Matched, the Heroes of Olympus series, Pretty Little Liars, plus some Meg Cabot books when I was in middle school.
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Something you said towards the beginning of your post about ebbing talked down to resonated with me because of a conversation I had with my best friend, who has been teaching middle school for two years. We were listening to the audible of “They Went Left” and agreed that the beginning dragged and parts felt redundant. This lead to her explaining something she’s noticed: middle grades books do tend to talk down to their target demographic. While yes, some students need this because their parents have tried to shelter them, and therefore are so easily scandalized, many kids, like you at that age, don’t want to feel babied, even by the books that are meant to be for them. The example she gave was the MG Jason Reynolds book that won a bunch of awards (don’t know the name, but I think it was “As Brave As You”). She told me that one of the conflicts in the story was the kid flinging the poop over the fence and breaking something and how much trouble he was going to be in, and how stupid she felt the whole thing was. She said that she was annoyed that the guy who writes such wonderful YA books missed the mark for his MG book by choosing a conflict that was really rather juvenile and that this book then went on to win awards (she believed it only got those awards because the author was Jason Reynolds).
I’m telling you all this to try to validate your point of view both from then and now. I do believe that finding good MG books for hour kids will be harder than finding good YA novels for your kids, and that I hope this class and your peers can help you with it. I don’t know many good recommendations myself (just the graphic novel “This Was Our Pact” pretty much) but will try to keep an eye out for you and think of books Ive read in the past to recommend.
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Olivia! I really resonate with your concern about book choices for your younger students, especially considering that my younger reading habits were very similar to yours too. I’m teaching freshman next year, and after spending a year with seniors for student teaching I now have no idea what kinds of books are good for 9th?? I think I read all the City of Bones books then and I’m not quite sure I want to be giving out recommendations for that series…
Also, figuring out what makes a book challenging and getting them to the right students is something that the librarians at my school are really good at, so I would definitely consider reaching out to them for certain recommendations. Really, if you have a good library in general at your school I would encourage students to do what you do there: peruse around and pick books that look cool to them. Even if that’s just in your own classroom library, I don’t think you can go wrong there.
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Hi Olivia!
You’re really spot-on my worries too when it comes to knowing what “maturity” level of books to provide for students. I’ll be in high school, but I think it can still apply.
Middle school is another monster, though, because people so much want to keep those students as children and protect their innocence. However, this is when they are most curious and thirsty for expanding their world bubble. They’ve also already SEEN so much more than we think by this age. I did most of my reading in middle school, so I imagine for a lot of students it will be the same.
I think you’d really enjoy listening to Kate Wheeler’s thoughts on this, if you haven’t watched her second Flipgrid post already!
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