Summer Reading 2011
Reading Requirements
It is important for C.I.S. families to realize the value of lifelong reading and encourage children to read all summer. Studies show that students who read all year make considerable gains over their non-reading peers, year after year. We are also directing all 8th grade students to read one specific book, along with at least one book chosen from the list below. Our common summer reading book for all 8th grade students is The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak. For the 7th grade students, this book is to be chosen from the list below.
As you journey through this novel, pay attention to the way the author develops character Take notes on the traits the main characters exhibit that you feel relate to the traits in the IB Learner Profile. When you get back to school, be prepared to answer questions about the characters, using specific examples from the text. Please review the IB Profile as part of this process. Which characters do you find the most interesting, the most remarkable? Why? How does the writer use imagery and detail to develop his/her characters in the book?
7th and 8th Grade List
Please pick one (1) book from the following list to accompany your reading of The Book Thief (8th).
When Toni V, a construction worker on a futuristic colony, finds the diary of a teenage girl
whose life has been turned upside-down by holocaust-like events, he begins to question his own beliefs.
After being sold to a cruel couple in New York City, a slave named Isabel spies for the rebels
during the Revolutionary War.
In an upstate New York farming community, high school reporter Hildy Biddle investigates a
series of strange occurrences at a house rumored to be haunted.
Fourteen-year-old Nadira, her sister, and their parents leave Bangladesh for New York City,
but the expiration of their visas and the events of September 11, 2001, bring frustration,
sorrow, and terror for the whole family.
Groomed by his father to be a star player, football is the only thing that has ever really
mattered to Mick Johnson, who works hard for a spot on the varsity team his freshman year,
then tries to hold onto his edge by using steroids, despite the consequences.
When her grandmother takes fourteen-year-old Agnes, her younger brother, and best friend
Honey and escapes Mount Blessing, a Connecticut religious commune, Agnes clings to the
faith she loves while Honey looks toward a future free of control, cruelty, and preferential
treatment.
In the late eighteenth-century, Sido, the twelve-year-old daughter of a self-indulgent marquis,
and Yann, a fourteen-year-old Gypsy orphan raised to perform in a magic show, face a
common enemy at the start of the French Revolution.
During the Spanish Inquisition, sixteen-year-old Estrella, brought up a Catholic, discovers her
family’s true Jewish identity, and when their secret is betrayed by Estrella’s best friend, the
consequences are tragic.
Silvano and Chiara, teens sent to live in a friary and a nunnery in Renaissance Italy, are
drawn to one another and dream of a future together, but when murders are committed in the
friary, they must discover who is behind the crimes before they can realize their love.
When Lord Death comes to claim sixteen-year-old Keturah while she is lost in the King’s
Forest, she charms him with her story and is granted a twenty-four hour reprieve in which to
seek her one true love.
Years afterwards, Ruben Hart tells the story of how, in 1929 Newport, Rhode Island, his
family and his best friend’s family were caught up in the violent competition among groups
trying to control the local rum-smuggling trade.
In the not-too-distant future, when biotechnological advances have made synthetic bodies and brains possible but illegal, a seventeen-year-old girl, recovering from a serious accident and suffering from memory lapses, learns a startling secret about her existence.
Alianne must call forth her mother’s courage and her father’s wit in order to survive on the
Copper Isles in a royal court rife with political intrigue and murderous conspiracy
Julie and Ashleigh, high school sophomores and Jane Austen fans, seem to fall for the same
Mr. Darcy-like boy and struggle to hide their true feelings from one another while rehearsing
for a school musical.
In September 1991, shortly before war broke out on the streets of Sarajevo, eleven-year-old Zlata Filipovic began to keep a diary. In a voice both innocent and wise, she wrote of the horror of war, the death of friends, a shortage of food, and days spent in fear – and issued a compelling plea for peace that has moved parents and children and will continue to awaken the conscience of the world.
Steinbeck, John, The Pearl
Hesse, Karen, Out of the Dust
Stocker, Bram, Dracula
Alcott, Louisa May, Little Women
Smith, Betty, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Twain, Mark, The Prince and the Pauper
London, Jack, Call of the Wild or White Fang
Anne Frank, Diary of Young Girl