2008

Read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith.     

Grade 9 Honors:

Students read either To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee or A Separate Peace by John Knowles. Students must be prepared to give an oral or written response on the first day of classes.

Grade 10:

Students will read Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks. Fall semester teachers will have the students respond to the summer reading in class.  Students must be prepared to give an oral or written response on the first day of classes.

Grade 10 Honors:

Students will read either Frankenstein by Mary Shelley or Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Fall semester teachers will have the students respond to the summer reading in class. Students must be prepared to give an oral or written response on the first day of classes.

Grade 11:

Students will read March by Geraldine Brooks. Fall semester teachers will have the students respond to the summer reading in class.  Students must be prepared to give an oral or written response on the first day of classes.

Grade 11 Honors:

Students will read The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Fall semester teachers will have the students respond to the summer reading in class. Students must be prepared to give an oral or written response on the first day of classes.

A.P. English Language and Composition:

Students will read March by Geraldine Brooks and complete the following assignment: read six editorials or op-ed pieces from the newspaper. Cut and paste these articles on pieces of paper, or print the articles off the internet. For each article, write a brief summary of the writer's ideas and discuss the strategies the writer uses to create a successful (or unsuccessful) argument. Organize the articles and your responses and submit on the first day of class.

Grade 12:

Students will read The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. Fall semester teachers will have the students respond to the summer reading in class. Students must be prepared to give an oral or written response on the first day of classes.

A.P. English Literature:

During the summer all students must read Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and a second novel from the list below. 

Albert Camus		The Stranger
Willa Cather		My Antonia
E.M. Forster		A Passage to India
Thomas Hardy		The Return of the Native
Joseph Heller		Catch-22
Henrik Ibsen		Ghosts
Henry James		Daisy Miller
D.H. Lawrence		Sons and Lovers
Anne E. Proulx		The Shipping News
Leo Tolstoy		Anna Karenina
Evelyn Waugh		Brideshead Revisited

Assignments:

1. After reading Crime and Punishment write an unresearched essay which connects one of the themes of the novel with a dominant technique the author uses in his work.

2. Visit a museum and find a work of art which reflects a dominant theme of one of the works you’ve read for this assignment. In an essay, determine and discuss the relationship between the work of art and your reading. Remember you are looking for a work with the same theme, not an illustration of the subject of the novel. Please include a copy or a photograph of the work of art under discussion. This assignment is not to be done on the internet.

Please note: Each essay examines a different novel – two novels, two essays.

These activities are to be bound together in an appropriate way. This portfolio will constitute the first grade of the quarter and accounts for 10% of the first quarter grade.