Homeschool Reading · Science & Nature

My Side of the Mountain

Name: My Side of the Mountain
Author: Jean Craighead George

by Jean Craighead George · a homeschool reading guide · Newbery Honor · 1960

Best for: Grades 5–6 (survival as applied natural history)
Reading level: 810L Lexile® measure
Subject: Nature study (wilderness survival · classic)
On Chalky: 21 modules with personalized comprehension questions

Use this book for

Science & nature (core): Sam survives on real botany, real falconry, real weather-craft — George was a naturalist, and every skill in the book is accurate enough to look up. The plan's science slot in novel form.
Reading skills (core): Comprehension across all six grade-5 skills, in a first-person journal voice that mixes narrative with field notes and diagrams — two text types in one book.
Character & discussion (tie-in): Sam chooses solitude and then discovers its cost. Independence versus loneliness is the book's real subject, and teenagers-in-waiting feel it keenly.

The book

Sam Gribley runs away from a crowded New York apartment to his great-grandfather's abandoned land in the Catskills — and instead of coming home in a week, he hollows out a hemlock tree, trains a peregrine falcon he names Frightful, and lives a whole year on what the mountain provides.

Published in 1959 and a Newbery Honor book, My Side of the Mountain is the survival story written by someone who could actually do it: Jean Craighead George raised falcons, and Sam's acorn flour, deer-fat lamps, and weather reading are field-tested fact. The journal format — with Sam's own sketches and how-to notes — makes the book half novel, half naturalist's notebook, and the ending complicates the fantasy honestly: humans need people, even on the best mountain. Generations of readers date their love of the outdoors to this book.

Why homeschoolers reach for it

Skills you can verify. Every survival technique is real. Reading with a field guide open turns the novel into an applied-science course.
Two text types, one book. Story chapters and field-note passages alternate — practice reading narrative and procedure, exactly as the standards split them.
The independence question. Sam wins his solitude and then must weigh it. For readers on the edge of adolescence, the question lands personally.
The outdoors, made irresistible. This is the book that sends children outside to test what a hemlock looks like. Few assignments do that.

Reading skills it builds

On Chalky, every module ends with comprehension questions written from the book's own text, each exercising a specific skill aligned to the Common Core reading standards for grade 5.

Evidence-based analysis (CCSS RL.5.1): How does Sam make acorn flour? The steps are on the page
Theme & objective summary (CCSS RL.5.2): What the mountain gives Sam — and what it can't
Narrative element analysis (CCSS RL.5.3): Sam, Frightful, Bando, the Baron — solitude's small society
Vocabulary & word impact (CCSS RL.5.4): 'Hemlock', 'jesses', 'venison' — a woodsman's working words
Text structure & development (CCSS RL.5.5): Journal, flashback, field note — how the telling is assembled
Point of view & perspective (CCSS RL.5.6): The year as Sam tells it — what would his father's version say?

If your state asks you to document reading instruction, this is the record: which book, which skills, which standard each aligns with, kept automatically as your child reads.

Running it as a unit

In Chalky's grade 5 reading plan, My Side of the Mountain runs twenty-one modules — about two to three weeks at 25 minutes a day, open-and-go: the modules are already sequenced, so there is nothing to plan the night before. A rhythm, not a rulebook:

Weeks 1–2 — read and record. A module or two a day. Keep a survival log in Sam's own style: each skill he uses, sketched and captioned in your child's hand.
Along the way — verify one skill. Pick one — identifying a tree, reading the sky — and check it against a field guide or a walk. George holds up; proving it is the fun.
Close — the visitor question. The ending brings people back. Is that defeat or growth? Your child's answer says a lot, and hearing it is yours.

Pairs well with

Little House in the Big Woods — 720L · subsistence, family edition
I Am Malala — 900L · courage of a different kind
Bridge to Terabithia — 800L · imagination in the woods

Start your reading comprehension curriculum on Chalky

Standards references describe alignment with the Common Core State Standards for Reading, grade 5; homeschool requirements vary by state, and this page is a record of instruction, not legal advice.