Suggestions for What to Teach

Select a module of books below that corresponds to the main age range of your students and read them aloud. It might be helpful to think of age ranges like this: younger (grades 1–4), middle (grades 5–8), older (grades 9–12). If you have both younger and older students, you can read aloud to the younger and then assign a set of books for older students to read independently. The main goal is to select books that your family will enjoy and read them aloud together. If you read one chapter per day, you should be able to finish all the books in a module in one year. Click on any title to see that book’s details in our CM Bookfinder.

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Module Resources Comments
1 Trumpet of the Swan; All-of-a-Kind Family; Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh; Five Little Peppers and How They Grew; Mr. Popper’s Penguins; Pinocchio; Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Great for about grades 1–4.

(For more good read-aloud book suggestions, check out our Early Years recommendations for five-year-olds.)
2 Stuart Little; Understood Betsy; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; A Little Princess; Five Children and It; The Jungle Books; Charlotte’s Web; Black Beauty

Great for about grades 1–4.
3 Little Lord Fauntleroy; The Wind in the Willows; Heidi; The Secret Garden; The Princess and the Goblin; At the Back of the North Wind; The Railway Children

Great for about grades 1–4.
4 The Magician’s Nephew; The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; The Horse and His Boy; Prince Caspian; Voyage of the Dawn Treader; The Silver Chair; The Last Battle; Pollyanna; Some Merry Adventures of Robin Hood

Great for about grades 1–4.
5 Pilgrim’s Progress; Bambi: A Life in the Woods; The Story of the Treasure Seekers; Swiss Family Robinson; Treasure Island; My Side of the Mountain

Great for about grades 5–8.
6 Little Britches series: Little Britches; Man of the Family; The Home Ranch; Mary Emma and Company; The Fields of Home; Shaking the Nickel Bush; (opt.) The Dry Divide; (opt.) Horse of a Different Color

Great for about grades 5–8.

(Be on the alert for some coarse “cowboy language” in the first book of the series and some swearing in the others. You can easily skip it as you read aloud.)
7 Robinson Crusoe; Anne of Green Gables; Laddie: A True Blue Story; The Call of the Wild; Kidnapped; A Christmas Carol; Around the World in Eighty Days

Great for about grades 5–8.
8 Little Women; Little Men; Jo’s Boys; Tom Sawyer; Huckleberry Finn;

Great for about grades 5–8.
9 The Hobbit; The Fellowship of the Ring; The Two Towers; The Return of the King; Where the Red Fern Grows; The Innocence of Father Brown

Great for about grades 9–12.
10 Ivanhoe; The Hound of the Baskervilles; David Copperfield; Watership Down

Great for about grades 9–12.
11 Gulliver’s Travels; Great Expectations; Pride and Prejudice

Great for about grades 9–12.
12 Jane Eyre; Lorna Doone; The Deerslayer; The Last of the Mohicans

Great for about grades 9–12.

How to Teach

We think the main objective of Literature is to enjoy well-written books. Ask for narrations if you want to, but don’t feel that you must do a study guide or literary analysis on each. These selections are not meant to be analyzed as works, but treasured as old friends.