Building Literacy, Knowledge, and a Love for Reading
Give students daily opportunities to engage in wide reading with the Individualized Daily Reading (IDR) Libraries: Essential Collection for kindergarten to fifth grade.
This 120-title collection is a high-quality addition to every classroom library, providing a rich array of nonfiction and fiction books that inspire students to explore their interests, feed their imagination, and build knowledge as they read independently.
IDR Essential Collection: Aligned with Being a Reader
For educators implementing the Being a Reader comprehensive reading program for grades K–5, the IDR Essential Collection is an instructionally aligned and indispensable companion.
Featuring many texts related to the topics, themes, genres, and text types in Being a Reader lessons, the IDR Essential Collection offers further opportunities to:
- Extend the lessons
- Deepen understanding
- Expand background knowledge
- Make text-to-text-connections
The IDR Essential Collection is strongly recommended with any purchase of Being a Reader.
High-quality Books for Every Reader
The IDR Essential Collection contains 120 high-quality trade books — 60 fiction and 60 nonfiction titles — at each grade level from kindergarten to fifth grade.
Texts span a range of genres and topics including social studies, science, history, biography/memoir, nature, sports, animals, contemporary and historical fiction, mystery, humor, graphic novels, science fiction and fantasy.
- Time-tested favorites and new authors, themes, and styles
- Inclusive book sets that are specifically curated to reflect the diversity of the world we live in
- Varied authors who bring the full range of human experience and knowledge into the classroom
- Support for all readers:
- Half the books at each grade are on grade level
- 25 percent are 1–1.5 grades below grade level
- 25 percent are 1–1.5 grades above grade level
How Books are Selected for the IDR Essential Collection
The content and structure of the IDR Essential Collection was developed with the expertise of classroom teachers, children’s librarians, and curriculum developers.
This team brought their familiarity with literacy instruction and a classroom perspective to the book-selection process. Experts in the field, children’s publishing professionals — as well as children themselves — contribute their knowledge of children’s literature, commitment to inclusivity, and keen sense of students’ tastes.
We review thousands of titles for inclusion in the IDR Essential Collection and deliberately balance culture, race, gender, genre, and subject so that the books will appeal to a variety of readers. Each of the titles is placed into a library set, taking into account its Lexile level, journal reviews, and student responses.
The resulting IDR Essential Collection libraries are unique in their breadth and richness. They are continually refreshed with new titles from more than 70 publishers.
How the IDR Essential Collection Aligns with Being a Reader
Individualized Daily Reading (IDR) is an integral part of the Being a Reader daily lesson. It is a critical time for students to practice and consolidate the skills and strategies they are learning as they read independently and receive feedback and support through one-on-one teacher conferences.
To benefit from this crucial instructional time, students need books that allow them to further explore the topics, genres, and text types they’ve encountered in the daily reading lessons—along with texts that expand on their interests, satisfy their curiosity, and build their knowledge about the world around them.
The IDR Essential Collection meets this need with its inclusion of purposefully selected texts that align with the topics, themes, genres, and text types in Being a Reader lessons.
