My 12-year-old daughter has a strong aptitude in ELA. She finds her class at school to be boring and slow. It's no wonder–her latest assessment showed a Lexile Score of 1600 and near mastery of every skill (97 -99%). The teacher can't do much to differentiate in the classroom, so best I can do for now is push her toward more complex texts and encourage her to keep writing.
She is only 12 so a lot of the subject matter at the higher Lexile levels may push her boundaries, which I'm not totally opposed to. But she needs to be comfortable with it to keep reading. She hates the angsty drama of the teen section at the library. So I'm trying to steer her toward more classics, but a lot of classics need the context that I think a teacher should provide. Can she rip into Shakespeare without context???
She is also involved in school theater, stage managing a musical now, with ambitions to grow in that craft and do more serious theater work in high school.
So my request is for mature 12-year-old appropriate:
- Memoirs
- Plays
- Poetry
Thanks!
by Consistent-Reward618
1 Comment
I read nearly all of dickens’ novels, Brontë sisters, etc. at that age as an extremely precocious reader and loved them. My own parents wanted me to read, but did not want me exposed to any super explicit sexual content, which is how I ended up there. I turned out okay and I’m now doing a PhD on gender and class in the 19th century, an interest I attribute largely to those early formative reading experiences! I wouldn’t say you “need context” for most of those classics, as they are either primarily character driven or the social rules are a huge part of the text itself, but as your parent I would make yourself available for convos about the outdated social norms she will encounter in the texts. Great Expectations and Jane Eyre would be great ones to start her with. Good luck!