zuisa, completely concur.

The audiobook is REALLY good, too. Amazing readers/actors.

So, my evil genius of a daughter is reading at a 2nd grade level in Kindergarten, and her teacher has run out of books for her to read in the school library (the elementary schools here are split up in a weird way, so her school is PreK-K, and next year she'll go to the 1-2 school, and so on). In class, she's completely bored with the reading material available and basically refuses to practice her written responses to anything they read for class.

Her teacher has asked us to brainstorm an age-appropriate book series she can read on her own, for class, so that she'll have something more engaging to use for reader response lessons. The problem is that this teacher's definition of "age-appropriate" is waaaay more conservative than mine. The rule in our house is, if you can read it, you can read it. (There are some books we keep out of sight because I don't want my 6 or 9 year-old reading, say, Lost Girls, but for the most part nothing is off limits.)

The teacher suggested the Little House books. We thought the Cricket in Times Square series might be good. Both of those have problematic racist bits, though, so I'm wondering if anyone knows of a more modern series at about that reading level that wouldn't raise any red flags with a kindergarten teacher? We also thought of the Ramona Quimby books, but again, so very old!

What about Junie B. Jones? My nephew loves them , there is generally a good message in there and my nephew was a reluctant reader and Junie B. Jones was one of the books he was willing to try on his own.

Junie B Jones or Magic Treehouse?

We also thought of the Ramona Quimby books, but again, so very old!

I loved all these books at her age, along with Cleary's other books.

Old but good: All of a Kind Family. Mr. Popper's Penguins. The 21 Balloons. Pinky Pye.

New: Ivy + Bean. Mercy Watson. Kate Klise has a young chapter book series about circus I think. If your teacher doesn't mind less 'literary' stuff then Warriors, Goosebumps are very popular with 2nd and 3rd graders.

It's a tough age, when the basics are super boring but proper middle grade chapter books are a bit too much. The best books for this age IMO are old.

Jessica - Ivy & Bean, for certain - do you want me to ask HPF? we went through this exact same thing which is when the book blog was born... ( [link] - kind of out of service atm, devolved into emojis for a while too)

Magic Tree House, Stuart Little, Calpurnia Tate, Ramona/Cleary, Mrs. Pigglewiggle

Also maybe a little ahead but keep an eye on Tuesdays in the Castle, A Nest for Celeste, some of the American Girl Doll Books, Rick Riordian...

You guys are awesome!!

This teacher is fantastic, but she's been teaching kinder for over 20 years, so the literary-er, the better. (I mentioned that A loves reading Calvin & Hobbes, Nimona, Bone, and Amulet at home and she kind of made an "oh...comics..." face, like she knew intellectually that comics are supposed to be considered Real Books now, but couldn't quite make herself really believe it deep down.)

I remember the comic book argument when I was in library science school 30 years ago. The teachers grudgingly admitted that anything that got kids reading was good but one should get them on proper books as soon as possible. I did a paper on how comics were being treated in current professional literature that irked a few professors. But they actually begged me not to change majors to communications, because I was the most interesting student they'd had in ages. Which is why I changed majors, because all the other students were boring and I didn't want to end up like them.

Speaking of children and books, did I post that my Mom picked up The Gashlycrumb Tinies from ltc's bookshelf the other day without knowing what it was and started reading it to her? I heard her from the other room say, "I don't know what this horrible book is but we're going to pick another one!"