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Classics Still Fly With Students

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The Washington Post

Published: May 5, 2008

WASHINGTON - Children have welcomed the Harry Potter books in recent years like free ice cream in the cafeteria, but the largest survey ever of youthful reading in the United States will reveal today that none of J.K. Rowling's phenomenally popular books has been able to dislodge the works of longtime favorites Dr. Seuss, E.B. White, Judy Blume, S.E. Hinton and Harper Lee as the most read.

Books by the five well-known U.S. authors, plus lesser-known Laura Numeroff, Katherine Paterson and Gary Paulsen, drew the most readers at every grade level in a study of 78.5 million books read by more than 3 million children who logged on to the Renaissance Learning Web site to take quizzes on books they read last year.

Many works from Rowling's Potter series turned up in the top 20, but other authors also ranked high and are likely to get more attention as a result.

"I find it reassuring ... that students are still reading the classics I read as a child," said Roy Truby, a senior vice president for Wisconsin-based Renaissance Learning.

But Truby said he would have preferred to see more meaty and varied fare, such as "historical novels and biographical works so integral to understanding our past, and contemporary books that help us understand our world."

Michelle Bayuk, marketing director for the New York-based Children's Book Council, agreed.

"What's missing from the list are all the wonderful nonfiction, informational, humorous and novelty books, as well as graphic novels that kids read and enjoy both inside and outside the classroom."

Renaissance Learning's Accelerated Reader software for monitoring reading progress online was the source of the survey.

Twenty-two years ago, Judi Paul invented on her kitchen table a quizzing system to motivate her children to read. With her husband, Terry Paul, she turned it into a big business.

Truby, a former executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the leading federal reading test, said the company's learning programs are used in more than 63,000 U.S. schools.

Students read books, some assigned but many chosen on their own, then take computer quizzes to see whether they understood what they read. Students accrue points based on the average sentence length, average word length, word difficulty level and total words in each book.

Although some experts thought children needed more reality, the fifth-most-popular book among high school students, "A Child Called 'It'" by Dave Pelzer, was too real for Rachel Sadauskas, who teaches English at Yorktown High School in Arlington, Va.

"The true story is based on a brutal case of child abuse," she said. "A friend who is a social worker recommended it to me, but I could not finish it because it was so emotionally difficult to read."

Teachers and book editors were pleased at the resilience of Lee's 48-year-old novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird," No. 1 for ninth- through 12th-graders, though Mary Lee Donovan, an executive editor at Candlewick Press in Somerville, Mass., said she thought it owed much of its success to the fact that "teachers make it part of the curriculum."

The survey breaks down results by gender and section of the country.

POPULAR BOOKS

An online survey of readers by Renaissance Learning found young readers still like the classics. Here are the top books by grade level:

First grade: "Green Eggs and Ham," Dr. Seuss

Second grade: "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie," Laura Numeroff
Third grade: "Charlotte's Web," E.B. White

Fourth grade: "Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing," Judy Blume
Fifth grade: "Bridge to Terabithia," Katherine Paterson
Sixth grade: "Hatchet," Gary Paulsen

Seventh and eighth grades: "The Outsiders," S.E. Hinton

Ninth-12th grade: "To Kill a Mockingbird," Harper Lee

Source: The Washington Post

Keyword: Booklist, to see the complete list of children's favorite books.

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