Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Recommended Resources How to find additional books that follow themes...

I wasn't sure how to title my post - probably didn't make much sense! What I'm looking for is a way to find books that make good reading along with other books that are assigned in ds' LA class this year. DS reads *really* quickly compared to his classmates, but he enjoys the classroom discussions (but spends a lot of downtime bored because he ran out of the assigned reading). Most of the books that are assigned in class follow themes - I'd like to be able to give him a list of books to choose from as additional reading that would somehow "fit" by either having similar themes or content or ideas that would compare/contrast etc. Are there any places on the web I could look at, put in the name of a book, and generate a list of other books that would make for good reading as part of a somehow-related "group"?

Does that make *any* sense?

Thanks for any suggestions!

polarbear

Can you list some sample themes in which your son might be interested?

That's what librarians are for!

DeeDee

The scholastic book wizard is supposed to do that, but I've had better luck with the children's librarians at the public library.

Makes perfect sense--I try to do this with literature circles in my very heterogenous 9th grade English classes. Anyway, I'm not sure how old your son is, but you may want to check out Teri Lesesne's website. She wrote a book called Reading Ladders. The concept of a reading ladder is that it's a thematically linked series of books beginning with more accessible and leading children to higher quality and more challenging literature.

I agree with the previous poster, too, that giving us a list of some of the books may help. This is the type of challenge I love!