For this month’s Hoagies’ Gifted Blog Hop, the topic is Summer Reading. Is there anything better than long, uninterrupted days of beating the heat with a good book? We wanted to keep this post short and sweet so you can get back to your favorite books!
Finding books for gifted kids that are both challenging enough to be fun but still content-appropriate for their age can be difficult. For kids, we love GT-World Reading Lists, which has books classified by length, with notes.
Another great resource is Lexile.com, which allows you to look up books by Lexile measure. A Lexile measure is a great tool to give you the idea of how difficult a book is in advance. The website can help you find books by Lexile measure if you know your child’s measure. If you don’t, however, you can simply look up a book they read recently and see what its measure is, for guidance on where to begin.
For parents, there is also a GT-World Reading List. We would especially recommend Some of My Best Friends Are Books: Guiding Gifted Readers, by Judith Wynn Halsted. For fun, you can check out Time’s “How a Book Becomes the Book of the Summer,” and make sure you don’t miss out on this summer’s potential hits.
For kids and parents, we also love NPR’s Best Books of 2013 Guide. While the books are mostly for adults (so you’ll probably want to be present with your child if they use this resource), there is a kids’ category as well. We love that the books can be sorted and filtered, allowing you to combine various categories that you want to read, as opposed to a static “best of” list.
