Summer is the perfect reading season, and we’re making literary guides available for you to encourage your child to expand and deepen their reading experience. Each guide contains a featured book with guidelines in how to stimulate critical thinking.

This week’s book is Elly Mackay’s “If You Hold a Seed” covers the author’s experience with pregnancy and her core desire for growth. Pre-discussion with your child can help sharpen their experience before they start to read and connect to the themes of growth.

Maximizing a literary engagement experience is a crucial tool in a child’s development. Like the featured book, you can really explore the theme of growth through these guides.

Our Summer Reading Resource series is coming to a close with our seventh and final installment, Astrid Lindgren’s “Ronia, The Robber’s Daughter.” The accompanying literature guide is written for 4th grade students with lessons and exercises in finding context clues and understanding characters. The guide also includes a rich list of questions to ponder for each chapter in the story…

“Make Way for Ducklings,” written and illustrated by Robert McCloskey, is our featured title this week in our Summer Reading Resource series. This downloadable literature guide, written for use with 1st & 2nd grade students, includes outlines for activities that call for readers to create their own list of rhyming family names, write a new adventure for the Mallard family, and gain practice reading aloud. The guide also includes suggestions for post-reading discussions about the historical context of the story, the book’s illustrations, protecting animals, and the relationship that animals have with humans when they live so close to each other…

This week as part of our Literature Guide Series, “Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse” is featured. The literature guide accompanying the story includes lesson plans for helping children use the book as a platform for expanding their understanding of descriptive language and developing their skills in summarizing a text. The guide also includes questions for pre-reading discussion, and a list of possible topics to discuss after reading to help children understand the story and learn from it…

Our Summer Reading Resource Literary Guide series continues this week with Kate Banks’ book, “Max’s Words,” illustrated by Boris Kulikov. The literature guide provided for “Max’s Words” is written for six- and seven-year-old first graders, but the activities – which focus mainly on defining words and creating connections to text – could easily be used with students of any elementary age. There are mini-lesson outlines for activities that can be done to encourage young students to make text-to-text and text-to-self connections during and after reading, an exercise that helps students to make what they have read meaningful and to extract themes from a text…

Our Summer Reading Resource Literary Guide series continues this week with Roald Dahl classic, “Danny the Champion of the World.” The literature guide is written with 4th grade students in mind, but the story can be easily read and appreciated by younger students who have begun reading chapter books… a fun book for bedtime read-aloud time or to absorb aurally on CD during summer travel!

Our Summer Reading Resource literary guide series continues this week with Western Massachusetts author Mo Willems’ “City Dog, Country Frog.” This downloadable literary guide pairs Willems’ book with suggestions for ways to help children expand their thinking, create connections to the text, and allow their literacy skills to grow. Download the guide while finding out about other opportunities in Western MA to supplement studies via Mo Willems’ “City Dog, Country Frog.”

Letting Swift River Go by Jane Yolen, Illustrated by Barbara Cooney Our new Summer Reading Resource series will be featured here on Hilltown Families every week throughout the end of August, sharing downloadable guides of children’s literature from graduate students in the Integrated Learning teacher preparation program at Antioch University New England. Each literary guide pairs a featured book with suggestions for ways to help children expand their thinking, create connections to… Read More