27 February 2006

Read Across America

This week is the National Education Association's "Read Acoss America" week, which includes the birthday of the venerable Dr. Seuss on Thursday.

The whole idea of the week is to boost kids' enthusiasm for reading by making books fun.

As a kid, Word Nerd didn't need much encouragement to think reading was fun. Word Nerd was the kind of kid who would save up her money to order books from those Scholastic book order forms (remember those 4-page newsprint type flyers?).

This whole idea of reading to kids got Word Nerd to thinking about what were some of her favorite books as a kid. Many of these got read and reread, so if you're looking for some good kiddie-lit that came out before the world heard of Harry Potter, here are a few titles.
  • The Castle in the Attic, by Elizabeth Winthrop
  • From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by E.L. Konigsburg
  • The Westing Game, by Ellen Raskin
  • Trapped in Time, by Ruth Chew (out of print...this could be tougher to find)
  • The Prydain Chronicles (The Book of Three, The Black Cauldron, The Castle of Llyr, Taran Wanderer, and The High King), bu Lloyd Alexander

3 comments:

Denise said...

You really took me back to my childhood reading by mentioning the magic in the colored newsprint pages of Scholastic. For years we also got thin, brightly colored hard-back books in white cardboard boxes. For there I learned to love stories about dinosaurs, aligators, brother and sister racoons, Frog and Toad. Animals were much more interesting than people!

Anonymous said...

From one Word Nerd to another--right on with the Scholastic memory and oh, we have the same taste in children's books! What about Mrs. Frisbee and the Rats of NIMH? Or, The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet? The Great Brain series? Hope you've read 'em. If not, start now.
Good memories--thanks!

Bethany K. Warner said...

I do rememeber Mrs. Frisbee. Mushroom Planet and Great Brain aren't ringing any bells, but that's not to say I didn't read them. In between then and now, I had to read lots of stuff like Supreme Court cases for school that crowded out some of those kids books.