Check out this infographic:
Even though the data for this graph is based on a study on low-income students, its message is universal: summer reading is really important. Not only does it reinforce the verbal learning gains made throughout the school year, but it provides students with a positive summer activity. There’s nothing like disappearing into the world of a great novel on an afternoon in July.
While all of secondary staff are encouraging our students to read in all genres all summer, I’m assigning specific books for the incoming grades 9, 10, and 11. All of these books are located on their iPads, in the iBooks app. This app allows readers to not only highlight important passages, but also annotate those passages with short notes that are then cataloged in the table of contents. Very powerful.
Grade 9: King Leopold’s Ghost, the eye-opening account of how one man, the Belgian king, personally oversaw the extraction of the Congo’s natural resources and the death of millions of its inhabitants. A powerful introduction to our first IGCSE unit next year.
Grade 10: On Hitler’s Mountain, a personal memoir of growing up in Germany during the reign of Adolf Hitler. Full of brilliant anecdotes that highlight life inside that dictatorship.
Grade 11: Child 44, a murder mystery set in the Soviet Union in 1951, near the end of Stalin’s reign. The author of this novel is an amateur historian who did a ton of research to awesomely recreate the oppressive setting of Russia in the grip of one of the most infamous figures in history. Stalin is the focus of much our study next year and Child 44 is a perfect introduction to the man and the country he ruled.