Making sure your students have access to a wide variety of reading materials is an important part of library work. This list from Edutopia can help! Created with input from teachers, the list features diverse book titles for all grades and reading levels.

From the article:
“We hope they reflect human diversity in the broadest sense, addressing race and ethnicity, religion, sexual identity, socioeconomic status, and other special circumstances.”

We’ll share a few titles here to give you an idea of the list:

Grades Pre-K – 2: We Are Family by Patricia Hegarty
“Through illness and health, in celebration and disappointment, families stick together. Some families are made up of many people, and some are much smaller. Sometimes family members look like each other, and sometimes they don’t! But even though every family is different, the love is all the same.”

Grades 3 – 5: Drita, My Homegirl by Jenny Lombard
“Fleeing war-torn Kosovo, ten-year-old Drita and her family move to America with the dream of living a typical American life. But with this hope comes the struggle to adapt and fit in. How can Drita find her place at school and in her new neighborhood when she doesn’t speak any English? Meanwhile, Maxie and her group of fourth-grade friends are popular in their class, and make an effort to ignore Drita. So when their teacher puts Maxie and Drita together for a class project, things get off to a rocky start. But sometimes, when you least expect it, friendship can bloom and overcome even a vast cultural divide. “

Grades 6 – 8: The Arrival by Shaun Tan
“Shaun Tan evokes universal aspects of an immigrant’s experience through a singular work of the imagination. He does so using brilliantly clear and mesmerizing images. Because the main character can’t communicate in words, the book forgoes them too. But while the reader experiences the main character’s isolation, he also shares his ultimate joy.”

Grades 9 – 12: The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family.