12 th Grade Summer Read

1. 12th Grade Summer Read Why read over summer break? University of Tennessee, Knoxville, faculty members Richard Allington and Anne McGill-Franzen have completed a three-year study showing a significantly higher level of reading achievement in students who received books for summer reading at home. "What we know is that children who do not read in the summer lose two to three months of reading development while kids who do read tend to gain a month of reading proficiency"  "Just like hockey players lose some of their skills if they stay off their skates and off the ice for three months, children who do not read in the summer lose two to three months of reading development" Source: Allington & McGill-Franzen; 2010 Science News Daily; http://www.sciencedaily.com

2. The Summer Reading Assignment will Increase/Enhance • Reading Level • Visualization Skills • Language Skills • Critical Thinking • Analysis Skills • Vocabulary • Writing Skills • Spelling

3. Freakonomics Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives—how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. Freakonomics, explores the hidden side of … well, everything. The inner workings of a crack gang. The truth about real-estate agents. The myths of campaign finance. The telltale marks of a cheating schoolteacher. The secrets of the Ku Klux Klan. What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world, despite a great deal of complexity and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and—if the right questions are asked—is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking. Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work. It is true that readers of this book will be armed with enough riddles and stories to last a thousand cocktail parties. But Freakonomics can provide more than that. It will literally redefine the way we view the modern world. Source: Sourcechannel.com

4. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. And though the cells launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of. Source: Bookbrowse.com

5. AP 12 – Literature and Composition • Jane Smiley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres parallels the story of King Lear. As the patriarch of a farm family in Iowa, Larry Cook turns over his land to his three daughters. While the older two daughters gratefully accept his gift, the youngest refuses. Chaos ensues when Cook manipulates his daughters to turn them against each other. Told from the point of view of Ginny and Rose Cook, A Thousand Acres explores the relationships that the Cook family members have with other and with the land. • “While she has written beautifully about families in all of her preceding books, [this] effort is her best; a family portrait that is also a near-epic investigation into the broad landscape, the thousand dark acres, of the human heart.”—The Washington Post Book World

6. AP 12 – Literature and Composition • Told from the point of view of Orleanna Price and her four daughters, The Poisonwood Bible recounts the story of the Price family, evangelical Baptist missionaries from Bethlehem, Georgia, and their struggles to survive in the Belgian Congo. They not only battle elements of nature, but they also struggle to understand the Congolese and their fight for independence from Belgium. Within the Price family, conflicts also arise concerning their religious faith and their relationships with each other and with the Congolese. • “The book’s sheer enjoyability is given depth by Kingsolver’s insight and compassion for [the] Congo, including its people and their language and sayings.”—Boston Globe