When school's out, most children no longer have to spend their summers working on a farm. There is plenty of time to read on rainy days, in the shade of a tree, and during the hour wait before swimming after lunch. To do some reading that has a global dimension, with or without the help of adults, kids can dive into the following books.- Among the 31 stories in The White Sail, youngsters who are learning to read will find Viking and sea adventures.
- By reading The Curse of Captain LaFook, children in middle school can return to the time when the Caribbean teamed with pirates, buried treasure, and a curse.
- The Open Ocean by Francesco Pittau takes kids under the sea for a guessing game and education about marine life.
- With Madeline, young girls can visit Paris in Madeline and the Old House in Paris.
- In We All Went on Safari by Laurie Krebs, animals in Tanzania's Serengeti Plain help children 5 to 8 years old count to ten and learn some Swahili. Youngsters who read this book also will learn about Tanzania and the Masai people who live there.
- Like We All Went on Safari, The Rumor has wonderful illustrations that will appeal to younger children. Storytellers in the Sahyadri Mountains of India's Western Ghats repeat tall tales like the one Anushka Ravishankar tells in The Rumor.
- In Kids in Kabul: Living Bravely Through a Never-Ending War, Reborah Ellis introduces kids in grades 5 through 12 to young women who want to be educated in Afghanistan. An older woman tells how she once brought an electric bill, instead of her doctor's prescription, to a pharmacy, because she never learned to read.
- Kids in Afghanistan go from a carefree childhood to tragedy in The Kite Runner, which also is a movie.
- Crossing the Wire introduces young people to immigration concerns when 15-year-old Victor Flores attempts to flee Mexico in an effort to support his family by finding a job in the United States.
- On a bright summer day, older children may be ready to deal with some of the world's upheavals by reading The Diary of Anne Frank or Red Scarf Girl, Ji Li Jiang's account of growing up during China's Cultural Revolution.
- Students can travel the world in Lonely Planet's Not for Parents Travel Book, a collection of short descriptions of places in North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Lonely Planet also publishes separate Not for Parents books on London, Paris, Rome, China, Australia, and Great Britain.
- Reading can lead to action with the help of A Kids' Guide to Climate Change and Global Warming. Besides presenting facts about climate change, this book suggests service projects kids can do to improve the world's environment.
- With the help of illustrations by Anne Wilson, Dawn Casey couples stories from around the world with related activities in The Barefoot Book of Earth Tales. Besides becoming familiar with stories told in places such as Australia, Nigeria, and Wales, children will come away from this book knowing how to grow tomatoes and how to make a pine cone bird feeder, corn husk doll, and other items.
- Every year there is a new World Almanac for Kids that provides page after page of interesting facts about animals, movies, sports, science, and other fascinating subjects.
At scholastic.com/summer, Scholastic invites teachers and parents to help kids log in their number of summer reading minutes in order to win digital prizes. If a school sets a record for the most reading minutes in the world, its name will be published in the 2014 Scholastic Book of World Records.
