Summer Reading Adventure English 2 Artwork by Hailey Melton, Heatherwood Middle School

Directions: Required Directions: Optional Read one book from the English II list. Complete one of the activities (a-f). Turn your assignment into your English Teacher at the beginning of the school year. Directions: Optional After completing the required reading & assignment Read more books Complete one activity for each additional book Turn your assignment into your English Teacher at the beginning of the school year.

Study: followed students through elementary school Study: followed students through elementary school. Students who didn’t read during the summer were on average 3 grade levels behind their peers who read. i.e.: 5th grade students reading at the 2nd grade level. By 9th grade, this data explained 2/3 of the achievement gap. Same students were low income adults vs. middle & upper class adults who read. How much reading does it take to combat summer learning loss? 2-3 hours a week

Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt (1996) Despite impoverishing his family because of his alcoholism, McCourt's father passed on to his son a gift for superb storytelling. He told him about the great Irish heroes, the old days in Ireland, the people in their Limerick neighborhood, and the world beyond their shores. McCourt writes in the voice of the child with no self-pity or review of events and just retells the tales. He recounts his desperately poor early years, living on public assistance and losing three siblings, but manages to make the book funny and uplifting. Stories of trying on his parents' false teeth and his adventures as a post-office delivery boy will have readers laughing out loud. Young people will recognize the truth in these compelling tales; the emotions expressed; the descriptions of teachers, relatives, neighbors; and the casual cruelty adults show toward children.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (2007) Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them—in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul—they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman’s love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival.

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (2003) Marji tells of her life in Iran from the age of 10, when the Islamic revolution of 1979 reintroduced a religious state, through the age of 14 when the Iran-Iraq war forced her parents to send her to Europe for safety. This story, told in graphic format with simple, but expressive, black-and-white illustrations, combines the normal rebelliousness of an intelligent adolescent with the horrors of war and totalitarianism. Marji's parents, especially her freethinking mother, modeled a strong belief in freedom and equality, while her French education gave her a strong faith in God. Her Marxist-inclined family initially favored the overthrow of the Shah, but soon realized that the new regime was more restrictive and unfair than the last. The girl's independence, which made her parents both proud and fearful, caused them to send her to Austria.

The Boys From Little Mexico by Steve Wilson (2010) The soccer team at Woodburn High holds a little-heralded record for most consecutive trips to the state playoffs: “No other high school team in Oregon, in any major sport, has been so good for so long,” writes Wilson. Yet the Bulldogs—Los Perros—aren’t a true powerhouse. Drawing from a student body that is mostly poor, mostly Mexican, Woodburn competes but, year after year, fails to win it all. In a familiar youth-sports-book format, Wilson replays the team’s 2005 season, dramatizing their title hopes game by game while profiling the people—coaches, parents, competing players, civil servants—and places around the players. Los Perros’ problem, ultimately, isn’t a lack of ability but lack of belief in their ability to succeed—a worry that, given the harsh reality facing the immigrant classes, is difficult for their well-intentioned elders to refute.

In the Time of Butterflies by Julia Alvarez (1994) During the last days of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, three young women, members of a conservative, pious Catholic family, who had become committed to the revolutionary overthrow of the regime, were ambushed and assassinated as they drove back from visiting their jailed husbands. Thus martyred, the Mirabal sisters have become mythical figures in their country, where they are known as las mariposas (the butterflies), from their underground code names.

The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore (2010) In 2000, Wes Moore had recently been named a Rhodes Scholar in his final year of college at Johns Hopkins University when he read a newspaper article about another Wes Moore who was on his way to prison. It turned out that the two of them had much in common, both young black men raised in inner-city neighborhoods by single mothers. Stunned by the similarities in their names and backgrounds and the differences in their ultimate fates, the author eventually contacted the other Wes Moore and began a long relationship. Moore visited his namesake in prison; he was serving a life sentence, convicted for his role in an armed robbery that resulted in the killing of an off-duty policeman. Growing up, both men were subject to the pitfalls of urban youth: racism, rebellion, violence, drug use, and dealing. The author examines eight years in the lives of both Wes Moores to explore the factors and choices that led one to a Rhodes scholarship, military service, and a White House fellowship, and the other to drug dealing, prison, and eventual conversion to the Muslim faith, with both sharing a gritty sense of realism about their pasts. Moore ends this haunting look at two lives with a call to action and a detailed resource guide.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo(1994) The charming tale of Santiago, a shepherd boy, who dreams of seeing the world, is compelling in its own right, but gains resonance through the many lessons Santiago learns during his adventures. He journeys from Spain to Morocco in search of worldly success, and eventually to Egypt, where a fateful encounter with an alchemist brings him at last to self-understanding and spiritual enlightenment.