Top 20 Best Reads for the Emerging Adult

This morning Jody and Jenni will be back on All About Women radio show. Today they’re talking about raising adult children. Below is a list of our top 20 best reads for every emerging adult.

We welcome your comments. So please, please, add to our list!

 

The 4-Hour Work Week, by Timothy Ferriss

7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey

9 Steps to Financial Freedom, by Suze Orman

Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott

Developing the Leader Within You, by John Maxwell

Do Hard Things, by Alex and Brett Harris

The Elements of Style, by William Strunk and E.B. White

The Five Love Languages, by Gary Chapman

Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Getting Things Done, by David Allen

How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie

The Last Lecture, by Randy Pausch

Man’s Search for Meaning, by Victor Frankl

On Writing Well, by William Zinsser

Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell

Rich Dad Poor Dad, by Robert Kiyosaki

See You at The Top, by Zig Ziglar

Total Money Makeover, by Dave Ramsey

The Warren Buffet Way, by Robert Hagstrom

Who Moved My Cheese, by Spencer Johnson

 

What Guidance Counselors Don’t Tell You — Radio Podcast

Jenni and Jody are interviewed on All About Women at WENG Radio, talking about setting kids up for success — what guidance counselors don’t tell you. Show starts at about 4:50.

Click here to listen, and let us know your thoughts!

College Bound Reading List — Hot Tip

Summer is coming, and college-bound kids will want to check out this must-have reading list.

The list was originally published on the College Board website. For some reason, I can no longer find it on their site, but it’s out there on a variety of blogs.

101 Books For the College Bound Reader

1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain 
2. All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque 
3. An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser
4. Animal Farm, by George Orwell
5. Antigone, by Sophocles
6. As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
7. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow
8. The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
9. Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis
10. Bartleby the Scrivener, by Herman Melville
11. The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath
12. Beloved, by Toni Morrison
13. Beowulf, by the Beowulf Poet
14. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
15. Call it Sleep, by Henry Roth
16. The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
17. Candide, by Voltaire
18. The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer
19. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
20. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
21. Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko
22. The Cherry Orchard, by Anton Chekhov
23. Collected Stories, by Eudora Welty
24. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
25. Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
26. The Crucible, by Arthur Miller
27. The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon
28. Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather
29. Cyrano de Bergerac, by Edmond Rostand
30. A Death in the Family, by James Agee
31. Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak
32. A Doll’s House, by Henrik Ibsen
33. Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes
34. A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
35. Faust, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
36. Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev
37. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
38. The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams
39. Go Tell It on the Mountain, by James Baldwin
40. A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O’Connor
41. The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford
42. Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift
43. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
44. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
45. Hamlet, by William Shakespeare
46. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
47. The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton
48. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, by Victor Hugo
49. The Iliad, by Homer
50. Inferno, by Dante
51. Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
52. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte 
53. The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper 
54. Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman 
55. Long Day’s Journey into Night, by Eugene O’Neill 
56. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding 
57. Macbeth, by William Shakespeare 
58. Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert
59. The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann
60. The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka
61. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, by William Shakespeare
62. The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot
63. Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
64. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, by Frederick Douglass
65. Native Son, by Richard Wright
66. The Odyssey, by Homer
67. Oedipus Rex, by Sophocles
68. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
69. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
70. The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde
71. The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James
72. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
73. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
74. Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw
75. The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane
76. Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe
77. Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare
78. The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
79. Selected Tales, by Edgar Allen Poe
80. Selected Essays, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
81. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
82. The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner
83. The Stranger, by Albert Camus
84. Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust
85. A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
86. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy
87. Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
88. Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe 
89. The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas 
90. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
91. To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf 
92. Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding 
93. Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson 
94. The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James 
95. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe 
96. Vanity Fair, by William Thackeray 
97. Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett
98. Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
99. War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
100. The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston
101. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte

Summer Reading Contests

Summertime is fast approaching, which means summer reading contests are about to begin!

Summer reading is a vital part of our kids’ education. Studies have shown that kids who do not read throughout the summer regress academically by the time they return to school in the fall. Then they spend the first couple of months playing catch up.

In the Stahlmann house, we try to participate in every summer reading contest we can find. Some require you to clock time spent reading. Others ask you to log books completed. Some even require you to read specific books on their list.

To keep it organized, I use a 1/2″ binder with divider tabs for each of my children. Behind each child’s tab, I keep a master list of the contests they’re working on, reading logs, and login details for online trackers.

Here are some helpful links to plan your summer reading program:

Top 10 2012 Summer Reading Lists for Kids and Teens 

2012 Free Summer Reading Programs

101 Books for the College Bound Reader

Help us expand our list…leave information on the reading programs you find!

Conquering The SAT Monster — Guest Post

The SAT is that scary test that students generally take to get into college and hopefully get some scholarship money. The good news is that this test is “standardized” which means that  the test-makers follow the same patterns, profiles and standards by writing similar questions each time; this tests the same skills in exactly the same way without being literally the same questions. Students can then obviously learn these hidden recurring patterns found on the test and become very test savvy since they tend to not be straightforward but based more on logic and reasoning.

Preparation is the key to doing well on the SAT. Students should start at least in 9^th grade or earlier if they are participating in a 7^th grade talent search such as The Duke TIP Letter.  The PSAT/NMSQT is also written by the same SAT test-makers and can count for huge scholarships in a student’s junior year but can be taken for practice in the ninth and tenth grade year. When students start preparing early, time is on their side. Waiting results in more test anxiety  and certainly less time to practice.

There are three sections on the SAT: Critical Reading, Math and Writing. The test is three hours and forty five minutes long and is offered seven times a year. There are no penalties for taking it as many times as students want since colleges usually just take the highest scores and often will combine high scores from different tests. Consequently this gives a student a higher score which can result in more college money.

The Critical Reading section contain the Passage-Based Reading section Students usually have to read four passages, work twenty-four questions and do it all this in twenty-five minutes which is about a minute a question, not counting the four passages which is daunting because of the great time constraints to finish. Besides that, the test-makers have built in tricks to make the students pick the wrong answers. It is practically impossible for students to finish this section on time if it is approached in a normal way.

Half of all students usually hate math. Consequently these same students feel the same way about the SAT math. But students don’t have to be math geniuses to ace the math section on the SAT. These tests have very little to do with the math they are used to. This section is really a logic test using math as the medium they are not necessarily testing how smart a student is in math but rather testing their critical thinking skills on a math problem. Each math questions can be answered in 30 seconds or less.

Most students are not excited about the essay section found on the test. After all, they have twenty-five minutes to write an essay on an unknown topic that will count as 30% of their Writing grade. This is a lot of pressure on students, but there are lots of students who have received perfect essay scores and it is really a matter of knowing what the judges are looking for.

The other three parts of the Writing section are multiple-choice and require students to understand basic grammar. But even though the problems may be grammatical errors, it is still a logic test and the questions are standardized with standardized answers since the test-makers use a limited amount of concepts in this section.

Learning how the test-makers write the questions and answers is pivotal for test success. With knowledge and preparation, students can learn to understand the recurring hidden patterns and fast ways to answer each question type found in each section. This can ultimately give students confidence, lessens test anxiety and students can then ace these dreaded tests.

 

Jean Burk is the author of College Prep Genius and has written numerous articles about the SAT and PSAT tests, College Prep, and How to Get Free College. She has been featured as an SAT expert on , CBS, NBC, TXA21 and The Homeschool Channel. She homeschooled both her children and they each received incredible scholarships because of their PSAT and SAT scores. Some of the benefits includedfull tuition, room and board, unlimited laundry and lunchroom passes, study abroad stipends, etc.

To download the e-book, “15 Secrets to Free College” for a penny (value $9.95) go towww.collegeprepgenius.com  Use code: power

Contact Jean at jean@collegeprepgenius.com  or 81-SAT-2-PREP