Summer Reading and more reading and still more!

Dear English II students,                                                 

You all have done very well this year and made much progress in understanding literature. In order to be well prepared for classes next year, it is so important to continue reading (and thinking about what you’re reading) throughout the summer. Reading is the best way to maintain your English reading skills as well as improve in grammar, fluency, comprehension, etc. For your classes, you will have assigned summer reading to complete, but I urge you to also read for pleasure in English and read for information in English as much as you can.

A few other suggestions:

1)      Read news in English online (if you can access npr.org or nytimes.org or other news websites, you can read and often watch video or listen to broadcasts – listening to spoken English over the summer is a good practice to keep up also)

2)      Watch movies or TV shows in English!

3)      Read blog posts about anything you are interested in (in English)

4)      Don’t leave your summer reading to the week before school. Read (and take notes!) on your books throughout the summer.

5)      Choose to read some books from my additional summer reading list (see below).

Additional Summer Reading Suggestions:

The Giver, Gathering Blue, Messenger, Son, & Number the Stars by Lois Lowry            The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon
The Book Thief by Marcus Zuzak
Persepolis 2 by Marjane Satrapi
The Hunger Games series
The Divergent series
Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt and others in this series
The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
Shabanu by Suzanna Staples
Howl’s Moving Castle by Dianna Wynne Jones
If I Stay by Gayle Forman
Mockingbird by Katherine Erskine
Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell
Wonder by Palacio
Any novel by John Greene
Every Soul a Star or others by Wendy Mass
The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

(Add more in the comments if you want!)

Also, keep writing! You can write emails to me each week about what you’re reading, and I will definitely respond. Or you can add blog entries discussing what you are reading, and I will read those and comment on them.

Have a great summer: read, relax, enjoy, and be ready to come back in the Fall and work!  --Ms. Guarino