Kindergarten
Mother Goose, fairy tales, and the first delight of words.
- Mother Goose and the classic nursery rhymes
- Aesop's Fables
- Peter Rabbit
- Winnie-the-Pooh
- Grimm and Andersen
- Paul Bunyan, John Henry
K–12 reading list
At NOCA, children don't read "excerpts" and "leveled readers" on the way to an essay they'll forget. They read the real thing, cover to cover, and talk about it. What follows is a flavor of the books your child will meet at each age — highlights, not a complete or final list. The rigor does not vary; the specific selections do.
Our reading list follows a classical K–12 humanities sequence. Ask any teacher on your tour to see the current year's full booklist.
Lower School
Lower School at NOCA is where your child falls in love with books, learns to read with real fluency, memorizes poetry, and meets the ancient stories that the rest of the Western tradition answers to.
Mother Goose, fairy tales, and the first delight of words.
Fluency takes root. Short poems by heart.
Independent reading takes off — and the Greek myths arrive.
Norse myths and longer chapter books.
Knights, pirates, and the American founding.
Beloved classics and the first encounter with Shakespeare.
Homer, Greece, and Rome — the classical foundation.
Middle School
Seventh and eighth graders begin reading as serious students read — annotating, arguing, returning to the text for evidence. The American Founding is read in primary sources, not textbooks.
American novels, Shakespeare on the stage.
The American century, in fiction and verse.
Upper School
By ninth grade, your student is reading full classical texts in a seminar that expects them to have prepared, argued, and revised. By senior year, they're writing and defending a thesis on a question that matters to them.
The first conversation — Homer to Virgil.
The medieval imagination and the great British novel.
The American imagination — Hawthorne to Hemingway.
Modernity in its own words — and the senior thesis.
A reading list only means so much on paper. Come see a classroom with the book open on every desk.