Guiding Reading Selections for a Young Reader: Help!

[Guest LED]

I have been reading the boards for a few months now but this is my first post, and I hope some of you more seasoned parents can give me some advice. I have 6.5 year old son who is an avid reader with a strong interest in biographies, baseball and history.

 

Over the summer I have been encouraging him to try to read fiction on his own, in addition to what my husband and I read aloud to him. To this end, I have been taking him to the library once a week and letting him pick his own books. This week he picked up two of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid titles. He's plowing through them very quickly and seems to find them funny. I knew these books would not be great literature, but tonight I picked up one and flipped through it and found it appallingly bad, especially for a kid who is not yet 7. So what do I do? Tell him he cannot check out any more of these books until he's older? Let him read them but talk to him about the bad behavior that goes unchecked in these stories? It is sad to me that parents/educators/librarians are so desperate to get kids to read that these types of books are passed off as acceptable for young kids!

 

How do you guide a young reader in the library these days? For me, the joy of going to the library as a child (and even now) was getting to have complete freedom to check out what I wanted, but I don't think there were books glorifying kids behaving so badly back then. They certainly weren't prominently displayed on the library shelves. Help!

[TrixieB]

When my kids were younger, I did a lot of the choosing. I found the Sonlight reading lists helpful for recommendations, as well as All Through the Ages and the SOTW Activity Guides (for historical fiction).

 

One thing I did was to make a few trips to Goodwill and Value Village, where I bought armloads of books that met my "not junk" criteria and catered to their interests: horses, mysteries, birds, nature, magic tricks, etc. I went without the kids so I had time to look through the books. I will say that we ended up with a lot of books this way, and the kids love some of them so much that they won't part with them, which contributes to our book overflow problem. But I digress...

 

Also I researched books and put holds at the library, so I could just go in and pick up the books instead of relying on browsing to result in appropriate books. I found that the library system often had only one or two copies of some of the books I wanted, so the chance of finding them on the shelf at my branch (one of 20-something branches in the system) was slim.