6th+Grade+Reading+List

Each girl will need print or iPad versions of her chosen books during the first weeks of school. Students will work on project based activities in class for each of the four choices. Your daughter may want to make notes for each text as she reads so that she is able to look up specific details for each project. The project based activities will serve as assessments of each novel.


 * *1st book (Required) //Among the Hidden// ** by Margaret Peterson Haddix. Born third at a time when having more than two children per family is illegal and subject to seizure and punishment by the Population Police, Luke has spent all of his 12 years in hiding. To what extent is he willing to defy the government in order to have a life worth living?
 * 2nd & 3rd book: Choose **** two books **** from the list below **
 * 4th book ** : **Choose any novel of your choice**


 * // Chasing Vermeer //** by Blue Balliett. A Vermeer painting is stolen. Petra and Calder, two bright, quirky sixth-graders, come together to solve the crime that has the whole world baffled. Going beyond a simple mystery, this story explores the meaning of art and the nature of coincidence.
 * // The Watsons Go to Birmingham //** by Christopher Paul Curtis. The ordinary interactions and everyday routines of the Watsons, an African-American family living in Flint, Michigan, are drastically changed after they go to visit Grandma in Alabama in the summer of 1963.
 * // Yolanda’s Genius //** by Carol Fenner. A portrait of an African American family that escapes the mean streets of Chicago by moving to a small Michigan town. Nearing the end of first grade, Yolonda's younger brother, Andrew, is still unable to read, and Yolonda's widowed mother worries about him and scoffs at Yolonda's dogged insistence that he is a musical genius. Now Yolonda must use all her physical and mental powers to devise a plan to prove to her mother and the world that Andrew is a child prodigy.
 * // Hoot //** by Carl Hiaasen. An ecological mystery made up of endangered miniature owls, the Mother Paula's All-American Pancake House scheduled to be built over the owls’ burrows, and the owls' unlikely allies--three middle school kids determined to beat the screwed-up adult system.
 * // Journey to the River Sea //** by Eva Ibbotson. Sent to live with distant relatives who own a rubber plantation along the Amazon River, English orphan Maia is excited. She believes she is in for brightly colored macaws, enormous butterflies, and "curtains of sweetly scented orchids trailing from the trees." Her classmates warn her of man-eating alligators and wild, murderous Indians. Unfortunately, no one cautions Maia about her nasty, xenophobic cousins, who douse the house in bug spray and forbid her from venturing beyond their compound. Maia, however, is resourceful enough to find herself smack in the middle of more excitement than she ever imagined.
 * // The Westing Game //** by Ellen Raskin. As Samuel Westing's heirs gather for the reading of his will, they are elated to find that one of them stands to inherit $200 million. In order to collect it, all he or she has to do is expose Mr. Westing's murderer, who also happens to be one of the heirs. As they are paired up and furnished with a set of clues, each scrambles to unravel the murder mystery. In a contest where nothing is as it seems, someone could wind up very rich-or very dead.
 * // Homeless Bird //** by Gloria Whelan. Only 13 when her parents find her a husband, Koly can't help feeling apprehensive about leaving home to live in a distant village with her in-laws and husband, none of whom she has met. The truth is worse than she could have feared: the groom, Hari, is a sickly child, and his parents have wanted only a dowry, not a wife for him, in order to pay for a trip to Benares so Hari might bathe in the holy waters of the Ganges. Koly is widowed almost immediately; later, she is abandoned in the holy city of Vrindavan by her cruel mother-in-law. Koly, likened to a "homeless bird" in a famous poem by Rabindranath Tagore, embodies the tragic plight of Hindu women without status, family or financial security. She is saved from a dismal fate by her love of beauty, her talent for embroidery and the philanthropy of others.
 * // The Cay //** by Theodore Taylor. In 1942, 11-year-old Phillip Enright lives with his parents on the island of Curaçao, but when the war moves too close for comfort, his mother decides to travel with him back to Virginia. When their boat is torpedoed, Phillip is blinded and finds himself adrift on a life raft with an old black man and a cat. They eventually land on a deserted island. Phillip is suspicious of "the large Negro," but soon grows to trust and love the patient Timothy.