All Things Droon

Since the children have spent hours and hours reading the 44 books in the Secrets of Droon series, I wanted to record a few facts about the series and their reading of it.

I found this very short plot summary of the series online at Droon Wiki: "Three children named Eric, Julie, and Neal discover a magical world called Droon in Eric's basement. Throughout the series, they work with a princess, a wizard, a spider troll, and other Droon citizens to defend Droon from the evil sorcerer Lord Sparr. In later books, Sparr is supplanted by a new villain named Emperor Ko, an ancient enemy of Droon. Near the end, Ko's right-hand dragon, Gethwing, supplants him." Eric is ten years old. 

We've owned book 1 in the series for months. I bought it at the used book store. It was sitting on a book shelf in the children's room collecting dust, taking up space, and being ignored. Then sometime in the first part of January Viva decided to read it. When she finished Droon 1 she requested Droon 2. That day (January 16!) I went to the library and checked out the next 9 Droon books. The Droon reading frenzy began. Bentley dived in and read Droon 1-10 within a week. Opa started making regular trips to the library. (He works just a block from the library.) 

At the start of February Bentley had read the first 19 Droon books. Viva was on Droon 5 and Jake had just read Droon 1. Bentley finished the entire series by the middle of February, four to five weeks after he started it. At that point Jake was ahead of Viva in the Droon series. Viva was finishing the Dragon Slayers Academy series which she started much later than the boys. However, by the beginning of March Viva was 10 books ahead of Jake in the Droon series. Jake likes to spend time playing Legos.

Last weekend Viva finished the last book in the series. WOW! She reads quite fast. She read Droon 1 before Bentley, but then she took a break to read other books. She dived back into Droon, but then went to Las Vegas for week. We did not let her take library books with her. I give her credit for reading the series in 7 weeks--a book a day. That's impressive for a kindergartner. 

Last weekend Jake was reading Droon 21 and he has read Super Edition 1. He wants you to know that he read almost the entire super edition in one day. He's not a slow reader; he's just not as focused on the Droon series as his siblings were. We are going to have check the books back into the library and check them out again. That's okay. It's better than owning them all and having to find storage space for them until Lincoln and Evan are old enough to read them.

You must be wondering (I was!) how many words are in a Droon book? How long are they compared to other children's books? Here's the scoop.

There are 44 books in the series, 36 in the regular series and 8 super editions (slightly longer books that tie into the series). The books in the series get longer as the series progresses. (I found the word counts for all the books online and then I made rough estimates.)
books 1-5 average 7700 words
books 6-9 average 9000 words
books 10-19 average 10,900 words
books 20-29 average 12,500 words
books 30-34 average 13,500 words
special edition 1 was 17,000 words
special edition 4 was 20,500 words
special edition 8 was 28,700 words
My estimated total for the entire series is 670,000 words.

I compared this series to the children's other recent favorite series, The Dragon Slayers Academy. I could not find word counts for these books online, so I had to figure it out myself. I counted the words on six pages and I counted the pages without words (pages with illustrations and pages only half filled with text) and figured out an average word count for 3 of the books in the series. This series did get longer as it progressed and there was only one super special edition. My quick math for this series was 11,000 words per book (twice that many for the super special) for a total of 220,000 words in the 19 book series.

The word counts for The Secrets of Droon series and the Dragon Slayers Academy series are typical of chapter books for the early grades (grades K-3). The recommended word count for that age group is 6,000-15,000. Young readers feel good about reading when they can finish a book in a week or less. (Our trio reads much faster than that!)

Earlier this year Bentley read the Warriors series by Erin Hunter. It was about clans of cats. There were four different subseries of six books each in this series. Typical middle grade (grades 4-6) chapter books are 20,000-35,000 words long. The books in the Warrior series ranged from 62,800 to 73,400 words and the super editions were 110,000+ words. Bentley read all 24 books in this series plus 2 of the super editions (He didn't like the super editions as much. He said they were too long.) I estimate the 26 books he read at 1,900,000 words.

I checked the word count on the average adult book. It varies by genre, but overall 100,000 is a good estimate. There are much longer books and much shorter books. This is an average!

One last piece of trivia: The Harry Potter seven book series comes in at just over 1,000,000 words. Book 4 is the longest at 257,000. We haven't given this series to Bentley yet because it gets rather intense (scary) and he's a sensitive kid that way.

Kara has requested that I let folks who read this blog know that the children don't only read children's fantasy series. Bentley also reads classic literature. He just finished a juvenile edition of Edgar Allen Poe. (That guy's writing is almost too scary for me, so you really need the edited version!) The twins have only been reading chapter books for maybe six months, so we don't direct their reading too much...YET! We are letting them strengthen their reading muscles before we assign them serious reading material.

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Another benefit of homeschooling is that homeschooled children have a lot more time to read than do children who attend public school. When you take into account the hours spent at school (6.5 hours), getting to and from school (.5-1 hour), and doing homework (.5-1 hour), public school attendees have very little free time left to read. They can't stay up late and read because they have to get up early to go to school. Yes, we do school work at our house, but the children don't dedicate 6.5 hours to scheduled school activities. When you individualize a program to a student they learn more in less time. Our trio has lots of free time and they choose to spend some of it reading. It's a win-win!