We are pleased to introduce our new SongLake Books James Collection. Recognizing that many schools are struggling to meet the demands of the Common Core State Standards, we have scrutinized hundreds of books from approved publishers and hand-selected only those that best align themselves with these standards.

Features of our James Collection for grade 2 include more non-fiction titles; repeated characters; repeated books by the same author/illustrator; repeated topics; different versions of the same fairy tales; variety of topics; ties to content areas: science, social studies; different times and cultures; and one biography of an author along with six copies of a work by that author. The James Collection also features different genres at each level offering more flexibility in choosing titles of interest for your students. This collection is designed to augment our larger Karen Collection.

Books in the James Collection span guided reading levels J–M to meet the needs of students found in a typical grade 2 classroom. The goal is to have second graders exit at a level M instructional level.

Our James Collection contains 121 books: one author biography and 6 copies each of 20 additional titles organized into guided reading sets for classrooms, Title I/ESEA, and new federal programs such as ESSA, et al. It is also ideal for bookrooms. Most titles included in this collection can be found in Fountas and Pinnell’s Booklist now found online. Each collection comes with two lists. One list is arranged by levels. The other list is arranged alphabetically.

As with each of our collections the James Collection is affordably priced below retail. This is truly a remarkable value for a well-designed collection from multiple publishers.