ENGLISH 3:
CAPSTONE
QUARTER 4 – NIGHT SCHOOL
MR. PARKER (2014)
PART I: THE NOVEL
Students will complete the reading of a novel chosen
from the list below. It is expected that students
complete the novel within the quarter, and stay up to
date with weekly blog assignments.
•
Nectar in a Sieve
•
Slaughterhouse Five
•
The Kite Runner
•
Fahrenheit 451
•
Purple Hibiscus
•
•
Things Fall Apart
The Curious Case of the Dog
in the Night-time
•
Three Cups of Tea
•
Heart of Darkness
*upon request, students may
propose an alternative selection
PART II: THE BLOG
• Create a blog on Wordpress.com
• Each week, students will be responsible for a
reader response blog post highlighting various
elements of the novel from the previous day’s
reading.
• Students will also post fiction/non-fiction work
to the blog; links to sources will be posted and
completed SOAPSTone/TPCASTT will be
attached upon completion.
PART III: NON-FICTION
• Students will search credible sources for related
material.
• Choose a non-fiction article of historical significance
with topics and subject matter related to your novel.
• Choose a non-fiction article of a current event with
topics and subject matter related to your novel.
• Complete a SOAPSTone outlining the elements of
the article.
• In addition to a SOAPSTone, students will also write
a paragraph (3-5 sentences) connecting the piece to
the novel.
PART IV: FICTION
• Students will search credible sources for
related material.
• Choose a poem or short story with topics
and subject matter related to your novel.
• Complete a TPCASTT outlining the
elements of the poem.
• Complete a reader response outlining the
elements of a short story.
• For either a poem or short story, students
will also write a paragraph (3-5 sentences)
connecting the piece to the novel.
THE CALENDAR
• Group A: Independent Reading Monday,
Computer work Wednesday
• Group B: Computer work Monday, Independent
Reading Wednesday
• Students are responsible for one reader
response post, and either one non-fiction or one
fiction post per week.
• Upon completion of blog work, students may
use any remaining class time to read
independently.
• Books will remain in the classroom, but may be
checked out under individual circumstances.
NECTAR IN A SIEVE
Author: Kamala Markandaya
In a small village in India, a simple peasant woman recalls her life
as a child bride, a farmer's wife, and a devoted mother amidst
fights to meet changing times, poverty, and disaster. This is the
very moving story of a woman in India whose whole life was a
gallant and persistent battle to care for those she loved.
THE KITE RUNNER
Author: Khaled Hosseini
The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship
between a wealthy boy and the son of his father's servant, The
Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in
the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading,
the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an
exploration of the power of fathers over sons—their love, their
sacrifices, their lies.
A sweeping story of family, love, and friendship told against the
devastating backdrop of the history of Afghanistan over the last
thirty years,
PURPLE HIBISCUS
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Fifteen-year-old Kambili and her older brother Jaja lead a privileged
life in Enugu, Nigeria. They live in a beautiful house, with a caring
family, and attend an exclusive missionary school. They're completely
shielded from the troubles of the world. Yet, as Kambili reveals in her
tender-voiced account, things are less perfect than they appear.
Although her Papa is generous and well respected, he is fanatically
religious and tyrannical at home—a home that is silent and
suffocating.
As the country begins to fall apart under a military coup, Kambili and
Jaja are sent to their aunt, a university professor outside the city,
where they discover a life beyond the confines of their father’s
authority. Books cram the shelves, curry and nutmeg permeate the
air, and their cousins’ laughter rings throughout the house. When
they return home, tensions within the family escalate, and Kambili
must find the strength to keep her loved ones together.
THINGS FALL APART
Author: Chinua Achebe
Things Fall Apart tells two intertwining stories, both centering on
Okonkwo, a “strong man” of an Ibo village in Nigeria. The first, a
powerful fable of the immemorial conflict between the individual
and society, traces Okonkwo’s fall from grace with the tribal world.
The second, as modern as the first is ancient, concerns the clash
of cultures and the destruction of Okonkwo's world with the arrival
of aggressive European missionaries. These perfectly harmonized
twin dramas are informed by an awareness capable of
encompassing at once the life of nature, human history, and the
mysterious compulsions of the soul.
THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE
DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME
Author: Mark Haddon
Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the
world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He
relates well to animals but has no understanding of human
emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. And he detests the
color yellow.
This improbable story of Christopher's quest to investigate the
suspicious death of a neighborhood dog makes for one of the
most captivating, unusual, and widely heralded novels in recent
years.
THREE CUPS OF TEA
Author: Greg Mortenson
The astonishing, uplifting story of a real-life Indiana Jones and his
humanitarian campaign to use education to combat terrorism in the
Taliban’s backyard Anyone who despairs of the individual’s power to
change lives has to read the story of Greg Mortenson, a homeless
mountaineer who, following a 1993 climb of Pakistan’s treacherous
K2, was inspired by a chance encounter with impoverished mountain
villagers and promised to build them a school. Over the next decade
he built fifty-five schools—especially for girls—that offer a balanced
education in one of the most isolated and dangerous regions on
earth. As it chronicles Mortenson’s quest, which has brought him into
conflict with both enraged Islamists and uncomprehending
Americans, Three Cups of Tea combines adventure with a
celebration of the humanitarian spirit.
HEART OF DARKNESS
Author: Joseph Conrad
The story tells of Charles Marlow, an Englishman who took a foreign
assignment from a Belgian trading company as a ferry-boat captain in Africa.
Heart of Darkness exposes the myth behind colonization while exploring the
three levels of darkness that the protagonist, Marlow, encounters--the
darkness of the Congo wilderness, the darkness of the European's cruel
treatment of the natives, and the unfathomable darkness within every human
being for committing heinous acts of evil. Although Conrad does not give the
name of the river, at the time of writing the Congo Free State, the location of
the large and important Congo River, was a private colony of Belgium's King
Leopold II. Marlow is employed to transport ivory downriver. However, his
more pressing assignment is to return Kurtz, another ivory trader, to
civilization, in a cover-up. Kurtz has a reputation throughout the region. This
symbolic story is a story within a story or frame narrative. It follows Marlow as
he recounts from dusk through to late night, to a group of men aboard a ship
anchored in the Thames Estuary his Congolese adventure. The passage of
time and the darkening sky during the fictitious narrative-within-the-narrative
parallel the atmosphere of the story.
SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE
Author: Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s
great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous firebombing of
Dresden, Billy Pilgrim’s odyssey through time reflects the mythic
journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in
what we fear most.
Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces
us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is
abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plotscrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously
through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and
Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war
who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.
FAHRENHEIT 451
Author: Ray Bradbury
Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and
literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than
put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the
printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.
Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce,
returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all
day with her television “family.” But then he meets an eccentric young
neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t
live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the
ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television.
When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears,
Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. He starts
hiding books in his home, and when his pilfering is discovered, the
fireman has to run for his life.