Murder on the Orient Express?

Question

My daughter is in 6th (sixth) grade, and her teacher has just started having them read Murder on the Orient Express. She is in an excelerated classroom but isn't this a little much for an 11 year old...am I crazy in thinking so or is her teacher the crazy one?

Answer 1

There is probably a content standard in your state for 6th grade language arts about reading different genres of fiction, and Agatha Christie's novel is a classic mystery. I remember reading it when I was about that age, maybe a little older.

Gifted 6th graders should be able to tackle the reading level. It's been suggested that to improve their reading ability students should read books where they recognize about 90% of the words, but I suspect most gifted students are not actually used to stretching themselves that much and have gotten a bit lazy. Your daughter should at least be able to find a word on every page or two that she doesn't understand, or she isn't in what's called the Zone of Proximal Development.

The story itself is fairly tame by today's entertainment standards. It's a little old fashioned, but should serve as a decent bridge to say, 19th century literature in terms of vocabulary and style.

If I were teaching the same class and wanted them to read a mystery, I'd probably use one of Tony Hillerman's novels involving Tribal Police in the Navajo Nation. That's just because it would either teach a bit about geography and other cultures at the same time (Orient Express serves the same function), and because it would be more likely to pique the interest of the indigenous population where I work.

Personally, my memory of how the mystery was solved is very vague, but I remember I wanted to travel to Europe and ride the Orient Express!