When schools closed and our kids came home for the rest of the school year, I was excited to try some new things to enrich the learning in my home. I’d always been jealous of my homeschooling mom-friends posting about their latest audiobook series and envisioned afternoons where my kids and I would do art or puzzles while listening to a classic book together.
Long story short, turns out my kids hate audiobooks.
Which shouldn’t surprise me. I’m not an auditory learner at all. I can’t multi-task to save my life. I don’t comprehend anything if I’m listening or reading aloud. Apparently my kids are the same way. We all just like to read the old-fashioned way: silently and independently.
While initially disappointed, I quickly regrouped. I haven’t had to be very engaged in my 11-year-old son’s schooling because he’s pretty self-motivated, but I did find it to be a great opportunity to engage in some learning together. I decided that since he had to do a fair amount of reading for school, and I suddenly had extra time to read, that we’d do a book club. There are many ways to structure this, but we chose to read the whole book cover-to-cover and then discuss the main themes using questions found online. You could also read chapter-by-chapter and discuss it little by little; it really depends on how quickly you and your child tend to read through books.
No matter the method, the tween years are a great age to read books in tandem since many of the books are interesting and insightful for parents, and can address deeper and more difficult topics for kids in a way that will help them develop empathy and understanding.
Before you choose a book to read do your research to make sure the depth of the content is in line with your comfort level and family values, but also challenge yourself to expose your tween to topics you might not have before. A parent-child book club is a great way to begin discussing hard things together.
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Ten Books to Read with Your Tween:
A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park
This book begins as two stories, told in alternating sections, about two eleven-year-olds in Sudan, a girl in 2008 and a boy in 1985. The girl, Nya, is fetching water from a pond that is two hours’ walk from her home: she makes two trips to the pond every day. The boy, Salva, becomes one of the “lost boys” of Sudan, refugees who cover the African continent on foot as they search for their families and for a safe place to stay. Enduring every hardship from loneliness to attack by armed rebels to contact with killer lions and crocodiles, Salva is a survivor, and his story goes on to intersect with Nya’s in an astonishing and moving way.
It’s Trevor Noah by Trevor Noah
Trevor Noah, the funny guy who hosts The Daily Show on Comedy Central, shares his remarkable story of growing up in South Africa with a black South African mother and a white European father at a time when it was against the law for a mixed-race child to exist. But he did exist–and from the beginning, the often-misbehaved Trevor used his keen smarts and humor to navigate a harsh life under a racist government. This is the young-reader-adapted version of his original book, Trevor Noah: Born a Crime.
As Brave as You by Jason Reynolds
When two brothers decide to prove how brave they are, everything backfires—literally—in this piercing middle grade novel by the winner of the Coretta Scott King – Johnson Steptoe Award.
Genie’s summer is full of surprises. The first is that he and his big brother, Ernie, are leaving Brooklyn for the very first time to spend the summer with their grandparents all the way in Virginia – in the COUNTRY! The second surprise comes when Genie figures out that their grandfather is blind…
Stanley Yelnats isn’t so surprised when a miscarriage of justice sends him to a juvenile detention center. After all, his family has been ridden with bad luck ever since a one-legged gypsy put a curse on his great-great grandfather. He is told that the hard labor he must perform, digging five-foot holes in the dried up soil where Green Lake once sat, is meant to build character. But it soon becomes clear to Stanley that the warden is really using the boys to search for something very valuable. The story of the hidden treasure, along with the warden, Stanley’s friend Zero, and the curse on the Yelnats family are all part of a compelling puzzle that has taken generations to unravel.
Hidden Figures: Young Reader’s Edition by Margot Lee Shetterly
The uplifting, amazing true story—a New York Times bestseller. This edition of Margot Lee Shetterly’s acclaimed book is perfect for young readers. It is the powerful story of four African-American female mathematicians at NASA who helped achieve some of the greatest moments in our space program.
The Seventh Most Important Thing by Shelley Pearsall
It was a bitterly cold day when Arthur T. Owens grabbed a brick and hurled it at the trash picker. Arthur had his reasons, and the brick hit the Junk Man in the arm, not the head. But none of that matters to the judge – he is ready to send Arthur to juvie for the foreseeable future. Amazingly, it’s the Junk Man himself who offers an alternative: 120 hours of community service…working for him.
Arthur is given a rickety shopping cart and a list of the Seven Most Important Things: glass bottles, foil, cardboard, pieces of wood, lightbulbs, coffee cans, and mirrors. He can’t believe it – is he really supposed to rummage through people’s trash? But it isn’t long before Arthur realizes there’s more to the Junk Man than meets the eye, and the “trash” he’s collecting is being transformed into something more precious than anyone could imagine….
New Kid is a timely, honest graphic novel about starting over at a new school where diversity is low and the struggle to fit in is real.
Seventh grader Jordan Banks loves nothing more than drawing cartoons about his life. But instead of sending him to the art school of his dreams, his parents enroll him in a prestigious private school known for its academics, where Jordan is one of the few kids of color in his entire grade.
As he makes the daily trip from his Washington Heights apartment to the upscale Riverdale Academy Day School, Jordan soon finds himself torn between two worlds—and not really fitting into either one. Can Jordan learn to navigate his new school culture while keeping his neighborhood friends and staying true to himself?
Out of My Mind by Sharon Draper
Out of My Mind is narrated by a girl with cerebral palsy who’s very intelligent but unable to express herself verbally or physically. When Melody is integrated into some general classes at school, many kids are purposely mean; others, including teachers, are cruel through their assumptions that Melody is incapable of understanding them. With the help of her parents and some supportive friends and teachers, Melody acquires a machine that allows her to communicate better than she ever has before. This gains her a measure of peer acceptance — but also opens her up to hurt when she realizes she can never really be like everyone else. Ultimately, Melody’s self-acceptance, sense of humor, and loving nature are inspiring.
Mia Tang and her parents expected to work hard when they came to the United States, but they had no idea how difficult things would be. After a year or two struggling to make ends meet, they find themselves managing a motel for a cruel and exploitive owner. The work is exhausting and the problems are many, but the Tangs approach their new responsibility with determination, creativity, and compassion, making friends everywhere and sheltering a trickle of immigrants in worse straits than themselves. Ten-year-old Mia takes over the front desk, and makes it her own, while dreaming of a future as a writer. Based on Yang’s own experiences as a new immigrant in the 1980s and 1990s, her novel speaks openly of hardship, poverty, assault, racism, and bullying, but keeps a light, positive tone throughout.
The Boy at the Top of the Mountain by John Boyne
This is the story of a young French-German orphan who goes to live with his aunt, a housekeeper at Berghof, Hitler’s mountaintop home in Bavaria. Taking place from 1936 to the end of the war in 1945, it’s a tale of innocence corrupted as Pieter’s personal devotion to Hitler changes him from a kind 7-year-old with a Jewish best friend into a self-important bully who betrays his friends and is proud and boastful of his membership in the Hitler Youth.
What are some of your best recommendations for a parent-child book club?
