Expectation: Students are EXPECTED to read the book critically. When you enter the class at the beginning of the year, there will be an assessment to determine the depth of your reading and the critical thinking used to connect to the Author’s Purpose and Style, Themes, Characters, Setting, and Point of View.
Purpose: We read during the summer to ensure we cover the material necessary for the next year and beyond… What Research Says About Reading:
The following points are from “Reading In and Out of Schools,” a publication prepared by the Educational Testing Service for the U.S. Department of Education, and Patterns of Reading Practice, a publication of The Institute for Academic Excellence.
- The amount of reading that students do for school and do out of school are both positively related to their reading achievement.
- Students who reported discussing their reading had higher average reading achievement than students who reported never having this opportunity.
- When ranked according to the amount of reading they do, students in the top 5 percent read 144 times more than students in the bottom 5 percent.
When I Was Puerto Rican: A Memoir by Esmeralda Santiago
One of “The Best Memoirs of a Generation” (Oprah’s Book Club): a young woman’s journey from the mango groves and barrios of Puerto Rico to Brooklyn, and eventually on to Harvard
In a childhood full of tropical beauty and domestic strife, poverty and tenderness, Esmeralda Santiago learned the proper way to eat a guava, the sound of tree frogs, the taste of morcilla, and the formula for ushering a dead baby’s soul to heaven. But when her mother, Mami, a force of nature, takes off to New York with her seven, soon to be eleven children, Esmeralda, the oldest, must learn new rules, a new language, and eventually a new identity. In the first of her three acclaimed memoirs, Esmeralda brilliantly recreates her tremendous journey from the idyllic landscape and tumultuous family life of her earliest years, to translating for her mother at the welfare office, and to high honors at Harvard.