Middle School Students Reading Between the Lines

The Great Hearts Middle School Reading List provides us with selections from Shakespeare, Dickens, and Chaucer. But middle schoolers also read books like To Kill a Mockingbird and The Chosen, works not from the canon of the greats, but certainly modern classics worthy of reading, accessible to young readers, and rewarding to adults as well.

Reading the literary works that we call “the classics” show our middle school scholars that they are not alone in managing the joys and sorrows of life, and it is a benefit for any modern student to read in the lines of an old Greek poet the same agonies and triumphs they feel in their young American soul. These works not only remove the barriers of the present but also the constraints of our current physical realities.

It is during these years that our scholars continue to appreciate poetry and short stories, while beginning to dig deeper into full-length narratives, preparing them for the Humane Letters sequence they will experience in high school.

Entering into 6^th grade, our former elementary students read works like The Wind in the Willows, Anne of Green Gables, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Hobbit.  6^th grade poetry includes Sonnets 18, 29, 73, and 143 by William Shakespeare as well as poems by Kipling and Frost. It is during the middle school years that a student grows from the fundamentals of reading learned in the lower school and begins to appreciate the journey a fictional work can take you on.

7^th grade students enjoy the classics Call of the Wild, The Pearl, Great Expectations, Treasure Island, and Cyrano de Bergerac.  A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens takes many students by surprise as they begin to realize the many iterations of this classic that they grew up with and enjoy every holiday season are all rooted from a literary work published in 1843.

In 8^th grade, scholars read Beowulf and To Kill a Mockingbird, personal favorites of Great Hearts Academic Officer Jake Tawney.  Titles like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Sword and the Stone, King Arthur: Tales from the Round Table, the Prologue from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the poem Knight’s Tale all compliment the medieval history curriculum that is covered during their final year of middle school.

The middle school years are pivotal for many young readers as they transition from lower grades to upper.  Tawney stresses that these literary works play an integral part in a Great Hearts Education. “Literature forms the moral imagination of the student. It teaches the student what it means to be human and how to act virtuously in the world.” For the complete Middle School Reading List, visit https://www.greatheartsamerica.org/great-hearts-life/great-hearts-curriculum/middle-school-reading/.

Do you have a story or know of a story that you would like to see featured at Great Hearts?  Please contact jmoore@greatheartsamerica.org.