To: Students and Parents of AP English Students

To: Students and Parents of AP English Students From: Mrs. King, AP 11English Language Teacher Date: April 25, 2012 Re: Summer Reading Assignments

Dear Students and Parents or Guardian:

Your child has enrolled in an Advanced Placement class for the 2012-2013 school year. As a requirement of the class, he/she must complete a summer reading assignment. The assignment is attached.

Please review the reading selections and the assignments that accompany them and sign the permission form below.

Parent involvement is crucial to student success in school, so I encourage you to read the books along with your child so that you may engage with him/her in meaningful conversations about these informational or literary works.

If you have any questions regarding either the reading selection or the assignment, please feel free to contact me at [email protected] or at the school.

Please return the permission form by May 18, 2012.

Sincerely,

Casey King

English 11 AP Language Summer Reading Assignments As part of the English 11 AP Language curriculum, you will be expected to read a speech by President Obama concerning Afghanistan and the war, From Baghdad with Love by Jay Kopelman and Melinda Roth, and a novel of your choice. A copy of the speech will be provided or you can find it online using the information below. I have some copies From Baghdad with Love if you need to borrow one. The other book you will read is one of your choosing from the attached list. You must obtain approval from me of your choice before you read the book and do the assignment. You may also buy your own copy (I suggest used copies from amazon.com) or borrow one from a former AP student or from the local library; however, From Baghdad with Love is a newer addition to summer reading so former AP students may not have a copy. In addition to reading, you are expected to complete the following assignments individually and any plagiarism or copying from another student will result in a zero for the assignments. See me if you need clarification of plagiarism. Please be advised there has been a change in policy concerning summer reading assignments. If you choose to drop the class, you must do so prior to the first day of school. If you drop AP on or after the first day of school, the grades you receive for the summer reading assignments will follow you to your regular English class and be averaged with your first six weeks grade. There are two books to read, and although neither of them is difficult, try to pace yourself so that you are not reading both in August. If you have any questions during the summer, please feel free to email me at [email protected], and I’ll get back to you with an answer. All assignments are due the first day your class meets.

President Obama – Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on the Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan

For this speech, you will need to read this prior to reading From Baghdad with Love. It will help give you some information concerning the war at that time and put some things in perspective about what was really going on and why the soldiers feel the way they do. For this speech, I want you to mark all your comments/questions of AP merit on the speech itself, not written or typed on a separate piece of paper. There should be an abundant amount of comments/questions (at least 3 or 4 per page). This speech was given December 1, 2009 at the United States Military Academy at West Point, West Point, New York. If you lose your copy over the summer, use this information to get the text through a search engine on the internet (i.e. Google) and print a copy to complete for the assignment. This will be used for discussion. If you turn in comments/questions on a separate sheet, it will be a zero for this assignment.

From Baghdad, With Love

This novel is a biographical account of Marine Lieutenant Colonel Jay Kopelman that tells a story that is both affectionate and stimulating. It candidly portrays the ugly conditions of wartime Iraq and how with the discovery of an unlikely companion, Jay and fellow marines were brought out of the darkness of war. For this book, you will keep a reader’s log. Be sure that your entries are high level, thought-provoking statements or questions that are of AP merit. These will be used for discussion. Your log needs to be a minimum of three pages. I would prefer that it is typed using the format on this paper (ie. Microsoft Excel or tables in Microsoft Word). See or email me if you need clarification.

Your Other Novel Choice

Choose from the attached list and get approval from me before starting this assignment. If you have questions about a novel not on the list, ask me and I will let you know if it is acceptable. This novel will be used for a writing assignment that will eventually lead to the research paper for the spring semester. It should be something you enjoy reading about because you will work with it all year. If you are not sure what a book is about, you may ask me or look on Amazon.com for a short summary. AVOID websites that tell you everything because you will not be able to use the information in the assignments. ALL ideas concerning this book need to come from you. For this assignment you need to think critically about the novel and formulating ideas to present or defend. You will keep readers logs on Post-Its within the novel as you are reading it. Throughout your reading, I want you to make AP merit comments and ask how and why while reading. How does the author portray a situation or character? Why might he or she do this? What is the author trying to prove by writing this novel? These are questions I want you to try to answer on your own. We will have separate conferences later in class, but the Post-Its need to be completed for the entire book. There is not a set amount, but know that this will become a lengthy assignment and something you will be referring to immensely so the more you have the better off you are.

With all assignments, the readers logs will be used for discussion and future writing assignments.

Have a great summer, and I’ll see you in the fall.

Mrs. King

Example of Reader’s log format for From Baghdad, With Love

Write an insightful comment about the section of the book based on literary terminology, theme, your feelings or opinion about the literature’s relationship to your life or life in general, or higher level Explanation of the part of the rhetorical questions (do not book or quote on which you are overuse this element) Page # of book commenting EXAMPLE The Great Gatsby Why would someone spend all that money to have a party and not even go? It seems like maybe he has an ulterior motive. Perhaps he is trying to lure someone in. Gatsby has another elaborate Maybe a business associate or party which he does not attend someone in whom he has an Pg. 121 interest. Approved Book List for Novel Choice *You should choose something you have not read to expand your knowledge.* Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou The Handmaid’s Tale; The Edible Woman; Cat’s Eye – all by Margaret Atwood Sense and Sensibility; Pride and Prejudice; Emma; Mansfield Park – all by Jane Austen Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess The Stranger – Albert Camus Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll The Last of the Mohicans; The Deerslayer – James Fenimore Cooper Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas Oliver Twist; Hard Times; A Tale of Two Cities; Great Expectations; David Copperfield – all by Charles Dickens Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison The Sound and the Fury; As I Lay Dying; Absalom, Absalom! – all by William Faulkner A Passage to India – E.M. Forster The Diary of Anne Frank – Anne Frank The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne Catch-22 – Joseph Heller The Sun Also Rises; For Whom the Bell Tolls; A Farewell to Arms; Garden of Eden – all by Ernest Hemingway Brave New World – Aldous Huxley Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl – Harriet A. Jacobs The American; The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey Flowers for Algernon – Daniel Keyes The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts – Maxine Hong Kingston A Separate Peace – John Knowles To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee Moby-Dick – Herman Melville Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller (playwright) The Bluest Eye; Sula – Toni Morrison The Things They Carried; In the Lake of the Woods – Tim O’Brien Animal Farm; Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell Anthem – Ayn Rand The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger William Shakespeare play, EXCEPT Hamlet, Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Romeo and Juliet Frankenstein – Mary Shelley The Jungle – Upton Sinclair The Grapes of Wrath; East of Eden – John Steinbeck The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson Dracula – Bram Stoker Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain Cat’s Cradle; Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut The Color Purple – Alice Walker War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells The Age of Innocence; The House of Mirth; Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton A Streetcar Named Desire; The Glass Menagerie – Tennessee Williams (playwright) The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf Native Son – Richard Wright Parent/Student Form for AP English Summer Reading Assignment

Parent Permission Statement:

I, ______, parent of ______, give my son/daughter permission to read the AP summer reading selections From Baghdad, With Love and a book from the attached list that is approved by the teacher. I also understand that my child will be responsible for completing the summer assignment, which will be a graded assignment.

Parent Signature: ______

Date: ______

Student Responsibility Statement:

I, ______, acknowledge that I am required to read and complete the AP summer reading requirement, which will be a graded assignment.

Student Signature: ______

Date: ______

**Other Novel Choice (author/title/genre) ______**See Mrs. King by May 23, 2012 for your novel assignment.

Student Email address/ Contact Information: ______