Folks with school age children might be familiar with the Scholastic "Reading Counts" program. It rates books by difficulty to match them with students' reading levels, and assigns them point values. In our public school district, kids are expected to reach a certain number of points each marking period by reading books and passing online quizzes.
Zazzles was just telling me how she is trying to figure out what to read this marking period. I suggested Washington's Crossing. We looked it up on the website and neither PRR nor WC are included (yet). There is a place on the website where educators are encouraged to suggest books to be added to the Reading Counts database. I thought I would pass this along in the hope that some educators in the AS community might take a few minutes to suggest these books (and any other good reads that might cross your mind).
I browsed for other RevWar titles and did not find any I was familiar with--no Philbrick's Bunker Hill, no Tourtellot, no Ferling's Almost a Miracle, no Fleming's Liberty,, no Galvin's The Minute Men. If kids can read Gone With the Wind and the Harry Potter series for credit, surely a little genuine history would be good for them. If there's going to be a list that kids are steered toward, better to be on it than off it!
http://teacher.scholastic.com/products/independent_reading/scholastic_reading_counts/community/suggest_quiz.asp (http://teacher.scholastic.com/products/independent_reading/scholastic_reading_counts/community/suggest_quiz.asp)
Great idea!
Sometimes I think the Great Victory of this program will be composed of thousands of little victories like this...