Studio Aletheia · La Maison Lexicon
The Library List
Public Domain and Freely Available Texts, Mapped to the SC CCR ELA Standards
Every title below is legally free to read online, either in the public domain or hosted permanently free by a library, museum, or educational archive. No logins, subscriptions, or paywalls. Selections are drawn from each grade's entrance statement and Applications of Reading standards, weighted toward books and short stories, with poetry and drama included where the standards name them as required text types, which South Carolina does at every grade level.
Standards first, then the shelf.
Each grade section below opens with the reading focus the SC standards name for that year. A handful of anthologies, such as Aesop, Mother Goose, the fairy tale collections, and Bulfinch's mythology, are useful across a two to three year span; they appear once at their best fit grade with a different tale or selection suited to nearby grades.
Where these come from
Nearly everything below is hosted by Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the Poetry Foundation, or the Folger Shakespeare Library, all stable, ad free, education safe hosts.
Books and short stories first
Per request, longer fiction and short stories are weighted first at every grade. Poems and plays appear where the standards explicitly call for poetry and drama, which is every grade level in this document.
Two content notes
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (racial language and dialect) and Heart of Darkness (colonial violence, mature themes) are included for their standard placement in American and British literature courses; both call for teacher context.
Drama, grade by grade
K through 3 lean on folktales dramatized as reader's theater, since scripted children's drama in the public domain is scarce. From grade 4 up, every grade gets a real script or staged play: The Blue Bird at grade 4, Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare as a bridge at grades 5 and 6, then Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night's Dream at grades 7 and 8, ahead of the tragedies in high school.
Select a grade level to open its reading list.
Title, author, genre, and a direct link to the free full text. Titles marked as a folktale or fable note where they can be adapted into simple reader's theater to meet the drama requirement at early grades.
Every host, plainly labeled.
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