ELA Summer Reading Assignment – Incoming 10th Grade – 2011-12
All students entering the tenth and eleventh grades are required to read one ELA book from the list below
(summaries on back), draft an outline, complete the writing assignment, and submit the outline and typed essay
on the first day of school. The assignment will count as a formal paper towards your first quarter grade. These
books are all available at your local libraries and bookstores. You are welcome to read more than one book, but
you only need to submit one writing assignment for one book.
Writing Assignment: Write an essay that answers one of the following questions. Your essay must be 2 ½ -3
pages long, double spaced with 12-point Times New Roman font. All essays must have a clearly articulated thesis
and use examples from the book to support the central argument. Please proofread and spell-check your work
before submitting it (reading it ALOUD often helps to catch errors) – points will be deducted for careless work that
does not meet these standards.
*You MUST also create an OUTLINE for your essay and hand it in with your essay.
1.
Often in works of literature, there are characters other than the main character whose presence in the
work is essential. Select three characters who play a key role and explain why these characters are
important to the story and what they reveal about the MAIN character.
2.
The protagonist is the main character in a work of literature who often changes in some important way by
the end of the work. Identify and describe 2-3 ways that show how the protagonist has changed in the
book that you read, and what these changes signified in the story.
3.
In all books, the author wants to convey certain messages to the reader. These are the themes of the
novel, and they usually are developed through the characters and the conflicts they face within the text.
Write an essay in which you identify and explain 3-4 themes in your book. In other words, what are the
major messages that the author is trying to convey through his/her storyline? Your answer to this
question will be your THESIS.
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DO NOT write one word themes, such as family, religion, childhood.
INSTEAD, write a phrase that explains the topic of your theme, such as: dangers of dictatorships;
gender roles can be challenged
Provide about 3 examples from the book for EACH theme. Use details from the book!
A possible outline for an essay on themes could be as follows:
I)
Thesis: The author uses the following three themes: X, Y, and Z, to emphasize the
repression of Puritan culture. (write a statement about the ROLE of these three themes)
II)
Theme #1 (paragraph is about 8 sentences-10 sentences)
 Example #1: Details
 Example #2: Details
 Example #3: Details
 Why is this theme IMPORTANT to the book?
III)
Theme #2 (paragraph is about 8 sentences-10 sentence)
 Example #1: Details
 Example #2: Details
 Example #3: Details
 Why is this theme IMPORTANT to the book?
IV)
Theme #3 (paragraph is about 8 sentences-sentences)
 Example #1: Details
 Example #2: Details
V)
 Example #3: Details
 Why is this theme IMPORTANT to the book?
Conclusion
 Restate your thesis
 Connect your thesis to the larger world
10th Grade centers on world literature. Over the course of the year, we will discuss writing from around the world,
and understand how these global perspectives reflect universal themes. The books listed below are written by
diverse authors and are set in locations around the world. They offer a taste of the reading that we will cover in
the coming school year.
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A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Solider by Ishmael Beah
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Lord of the Flies by William Golding
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The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Book Summaries – 10th Grade
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Solider by Ishmael Beah - This gripping true story is about a boy growing up in
Sierra Leone in the 1990s during one of the most brutal and violent civil wars in recent history. Beah was a typical
precocious 12-year-old, into hip hop and fun. After his home was attacked by rebel forces, he was recruited by the
national army and made a full soldier. This book describes his journey.
Lord of the Flies by William Golding - The tale begins after a plane wreck leaves a group of English school boys,
aged six to twelve, stranded on a deserted tropical island. Their struggle to survive and impose order quickly
evolves from a battle against nature into a battle against their own primitive instincts. Golding's portrayal of the
collapse of social order into chaos draws the fine line between innocence and savagery.
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini – The story follows Amir, the privileged son of a wealthy businessman in Kabul,
and Hassan, the son of Amir's father's servant. As children in the relatively stable Afghanistan of the early 1970s,
the boys are inseparable. They spend days running kites and telling stories of mystical places and powerful
warriors until an unspeakable event changes the nature of their relationship forever, and eventually cements their
bond in ways neither boy could have ever predicted.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro - All children should believe they are special. But the students of Hailsham, an
elite school in the English countryside, are so special that visitors shun them, and only by rumor and the occasional
fleeting remark by a teacher do they discover their unconventional origins and strange destiny.
Life of Pi by Yann Martel - The precocious son of a zookeeper, 16-year-old Pi Patel is raised in Pondicherry, India.
Planning a move to Canada, his father packs up the family and their menagerie and they hitch a ride on an
enormous freighter. After a harrowing shipwreck, Pi finds himself adrift in the Pacific Ocean, trapped on a 26-foot
lifeboat with a wounded zebra, a spotted hyena, a seasick orangutan, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard
Parker.