Easy Chapter Books

Hello!

I received a question this past week from a teacher who wanted some ideas for short easy chapter books for the primary grades. He commented that the children don’t really have a lot to read during a silent reading period and wanted to know of some quality books for them to have.

I LOVE that you are doing silent reading. I truly believe that it is the best thing to make a lifelong reader. If you combine a daily silent reading period with reading aloud to children of all ages, you have the makings of super readers. I know that you’ve read about this from me before, and I will stop with just this short paragraph!

Let’s look at books for this age reader. It can be difficult to use chapter books because they can be intimidating to the younger children. Also, many of the chapter books that ARE available might not appear as though they are worthwhile.

The first idea that pops into my head is the Horrible Harry series by Suzy Kline. If you haven’t read a Horrible Harry book, please don’t dismiss him simply because of the title. In the first book – Horrible Harry in Room 2B, Sidney meets Harry and they become friends. Harry is usually asked to help sweep the classroom and he picks up all the little junk that one finds on the floor and makes ‘Stub People’ with them. When he has enough, he tells Sidney that the Stub People will bring ‘doom to our room’. He puts the little creatures on the teacher’s desk, waits, and is miffed that the teacher thinks they are cute. I read this book to my class years ago and we all made stub people with items that would normally be trashed. Harry is not really horrible, he is just a normal 2nd grade boy. There are many more in this particular series.

Barbara Park’s Junie B. Jones fills a similar role that Horrible Harry does. She gets herself into comical situations and kids just love her. Again, there are many books in this series.

An older series of easier chapter books is The Jigsaw Jones books. These are mysteries for younger readers by James Preller. These books say that the reading level is 2nd grade.

The Arthur books by Marc Brown are also available in a chapter book form. The same characters you find in the single stories are also in the chapter books. The stories are a little longer and a bit higher reading level.

If your students like Arthur the Aardvark, check your library and see if you have Berenstain Bears and Franklin the Turtle. These books do have talking animals, but if you don’t have a problem with that, they also have great moral lessons. The recent Berenstain Bears books are also focusing on Christian values. Prayer, the Golden Rule, kindness, honesty, forgiveness, and more. These are part of the Living Lights section that Mike and Jan Berenstain are now publishing.

Jean Craighead George wrote some great nature books in chapter form. There are four in the series. One Day in the Woods, One Day in the Prairie, One Day in the Alpine Tundra, and One Day in the Tropical Rain Forest all are on a 3rd grade reading level.

Another series that is a bit higher reading level would be Beverly Lewis’s Cul-de-sac Kids set. A few titles include No Grown-ups Allowed, The Chicken Pox Panic, Frog Power, and The Double Dabble Surprise. I’m sure you can find more if you look. These books are published by Bethany House which is a Christian publishing house.

Another author that publishes through Bethany House and other Christian publishers is Elspeth Campbell Murphy. She has written a series called Three Cousins Detective Club, The Ten Commandments Mysteries, The Beatitudes Mysteries, and probably others. These three sets are ones that we have in our library. They are very skinny chapter books with usually fewer than 60 pages, so not too intimidating to the little ones.

One genre that is difficult to find for this age level is historical fiction. There is a little set of books by Marianne Kendrick Hering called the White House Adventures. The Silver Suspect takes place during the James Madison presidency, The Mockingbird Mystery is during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, and The Secret of the Missing Teacup takes place during John Adams’ presidency. These books also have a Christian focus and is published by a Christian publisher.

One very old series is the B is for Betsy books by Carolyn Haywood. These books are actually quite thick and students don’t realize that they are pretty easy to read. The stories are old-fashioned and you may choose to weed them out, but if you have any books by Haywood, at least give them a try first. See if the children like them or not before you discard them.

Patricia Reilly Giff is quite prolific in her writing and she has a short chapter book series called The Kids of the Polk Street School that is fairly old, but fun. The stories are realistic about things that happen to students in school.

I hope these help you find what you are looking for. If you don’t have chapter books for your beginning readers, start looking around and stock your library with a few for those children. We need to catch them young.

Audrey