The grade 7 homeschool book list
8 books, about 90 hours of reading, over roughly 12 weeks at four days a week. Each one is here to do a job the other seven cannot.
Books sit in the 850-1080L band, up from the 780-980L of grade 6, and below the 900-1200L your child moves into next year. The eight jobs do not change from year to year. The difficulty they are filled at does, which is how a child meets the same range of reading every year at a level they are ready for.
6 of the 8 are literature and 2 are informational, so a year is never all stories or all facts. Between them the eight carry 6 comprehension skills: finding evidence, theme & main idea, character & plot, vocabulary in context, text structure, point of view.
The grade 7 books
- Brisingr by Christopher Paolini — Stamina & volume, 1000L. A genuinely long novel. Note it is third in its series, which needs sequencing.
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain — Literary language, 930L. Heavy period dialect, and irony a reader has to detect unaided.
- Chicago Poems by Carl Sandburg — Poetry & prosody, poetry. Free verse about a working American city, pairing with the shelf's historical strength.
- The Red Fairy Book by Andrew Lang — Folklore & myth, 900L. Darker, stranger tales than the Blue book, with motifs that recur across cultures.
- Elementary Geography by Charlotte Mason — Science & nature, 880L. Physical geography from the source of the tradition this shelf is built on.
- The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown — Biography & history, 950L. The 1936 Olympics as social history: class, propaganda and endurance.
- Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis — Mirror & window, 950L. A Depression-era orphan whose humour carries the hardship.
- Hatchet (Brian's Saga #1) by Gary Paulsen — Stretch text, 1020L. Spare, technical survival prose. Short sentences, high information density.