Junior Great Books at Colby College - 2024

Due to Covid, Junior Great Books at Colby will not be active this summer.

History of Junior Great Books

Extending the Great Books program to younger readers was a natural outgrowth of the mission of reading for all, and within a few years, Great Books programs cropped up in high schools and even elementary schools. Following successful pilots in Detroit and elsewhere, the Foundation launched the Junior Great Books program in 1962, offering five boxed sets of paperback books for grades 5-9.

Slow to start, the program got a tremendous boost when the Junior League of Chicago became a sponsor and placed hundreds of volunteers in schools to lead discussion groups. Within two years an estimated 48,000 children were enrolled in 3,200 groups in public and private schools across the country.

Initially, most of the selections in the Junior program were works from the adult program, shorter works of Virgil and Tolstoy, for example, and excerpts from Pilgrim’s Progress and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. With each new edition, though, the program’s range of literature was broadened to include more folktales, children’s classics, and respected contemporary works.

The program was also expanded to include younger readers. The 1975 and 1984 editions of Junior Great Books added literature for grades 2-4, and in 1991, Junior Great Books Read-Aloud brought the program’s outstanding literature to pre-readers and beginning readers in kindergarten and first grade.

From the beginning, Junior Great Books demonstrated that even very young children can handle the complex tasks asked of them in Shared Inquiry. Still, throughout the eighties, most programs in schools served students who were already reading well.

In response, in 1992 the Foundation introduced a major expansion of the program that integrated reading, writing, and discussion. The new Junior Great Books Curriculum made it easier for schools to incorporate Great Books into the mainstream reading and language arts curriculum.

Planned Junior Great Books for 2020

Oldest

Ages 13-16

• Into The Wild
  John Krakauer
• Passing
  Nella Larsen
• Homeless Bird
  Grace Whelan
• The Pearl
  John Steinbeck

Middle

Ages 9-12

• A Handful of Stars
  Cynthia Lord
• Phineas Gage, A Gruesom But True Story About Brain Science
  John Fleischman
• Homeless Bird
  Grace Whelan
• M C Higgins The Great
  Virginia Hamilton

Youngest

Ages 4-8

• The Camping Trip That Saved America, Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, and Our National Park
  Barb Rosenstock, illustrated by Modicai Gerstein
• Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio
  Peg Kehret
• The Hundred Dresses
  Eleanor Estes, illustrated by Louis Slobodkin
• The Curious Lobster
  Richard W. Hatch