Kindergarten Great Lakes Great Books Award reading list

About the Kindergarten Great Lakes Great Books Award reading list

Great Lakes Great Books Award is the Great Lakes Great Books Award framework. ReadingList tracks 13 titles referenced by Great Lakes Great Books Award at the kindergartenlevel, each tied to a primary-source citation on the book’s detail page. The framework is published at michiganreading.org.

At the kindergarten level — the K-2grade band — students are emerging and early readers, with the curriculum focused on decoding, fluency, and read-aloud comprehension. Per Common Core’s Appendix A complexity bands, text difficulty at this stage typically falls around BR (Beginning Reader) to roughly 500L. A single Great Lakes Great Books Award classroom can still span a wide range of reading levels.

Unlike a state reading list, a Great Lakes Great Books Award list is portable: the same framework is taught across districts and, in the case of AP and IB, across countries. That makes these titles a reliable backbone for kindergarten planning whether you are a teacher mapping a unit, a homeschooler following a recognized sequence, or a parent checking what Great Lakes Great Books Award expects.

How to use this list: treat the Great Lakes Great Books Award titles as the core and layer in state-cited or thematically-related books to round out a kindergartenyear. Each book’s page shows its Lexile measure, grade range, themes, and any challenge history, so you can match a text to a specific reader rather than to the grade label alone.