Our curated lists make text-based vocabulary instruction easy.

We know educators rely on Vocabulary.com's ready-made, curriculum-aligned resources, so we've revamped our most frequently assigned lists. We've made it easy for you to plan ahead and incorporate vocabulary instruction on the most commonly taught classroom texts into your lesson plans.

Explore these updated lists and prepare your students to tackle the most important and challenging vocabulary they'll encounter in these classic texts. Don't see the resources you're looking for? Check out even more lists for the most commonly assigned classroom texts in our previous blog post.

 

Novels

The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon
The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Elizabeth George Speare
Rules, Cynthia Lord
The House of the Scorpion, Nancy Farmer
The Help, Kathryn Stockett
Milkweed, Jerry Spinelli
The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Stranger, Albert Camus
My Side of the Mountain, Jean Craighead George
Grendel, John Gardner
In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum
Life As We Knew It, Susan Beth Pfeffer
The Magician’s Nephew, C.S. Lewis
The Time Machine, H.G. Wells
The Tale of Despereaux, Kate DiCamillo
The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
The Martian, Andy Weir
Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
The Awakening, Kate Chopin
The Fault in Our Stars, John Green
The Great Gilly Hopkins, Katherine Paterson
Mockingbird, Kathryn Erskine
The Sea of Monsters, Rick Riordan
Fallen Angels, Walter Dean Myers
Orbiting Jupiter, Gary D. Schmidt
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
The Namesake, Juhmpa Lahiri
The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells
Mississippi Trial, 1955 Chris Crow
The Golden Compass, Philip Pullman
The Lost Hero, Rick Riordan
The Last Olympian, Rick Riordan
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Slam!, Walter Dean Myers
The Battle of the Labyrinth, Rick Riordan
The Son of Neptune, Rick Riordan

Poetry

A Noiseless Patient Spider, Walt Whitman
“Song of Myself”, Walt Whitman
“Birches”, Robert Frost
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot
“Digging”, Seamus Heaney
The Song of Wandering Aengus, W.B. Yeats
“Death of a Naturalist”, Seamus Heany

Plays

Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw
Our Town, Thornton Wilder
The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde

Non-Fiction

Sugar Changed the World, Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos
The Freedom Writers Diary, Erin Gruwell
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot
Red Scarf Girl, Ji-li Jiang
The Color of Water, James McBride
Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer
The Distance Between Us, Reyna Grande
Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela
Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehenreich
The Great Fire, Jim Murphy
Friday Night Lights, H. G. Bissinger

For even more resources that make curriculum aligned word learning easy, visit our Teacher Resources page!