Philadelphia Virtual Academy
School District of PhiladelphiaCategory: Summer Reading 2015
Classic Summer Reads For 12th Graders
Brave New World Aldous Huxley Huxley´s vision of the future in his astonishing 1931 novel Brave New World — a world of tomorrow in which capitalist civilization has been reconstituted through the most efficient scientific and psychological engineering, where the people are genetically designed to be passive, consistently useful to the ruling class. Emma Jane…
Classic Summer Reads For 11th Graders
A Raisin in the Sun Lorraine Hansberry This live, full-cast performance of Lorraine Hansberry’s classic 1958 play tells the story of a working class African-American family living in a small apartment on Chicago’s Southside. The matriarchal Lena “Mama” Younger awaits the arrival of her deceased husband’s $10,000 life insurance check. Her son, Walter, maneuvers to…
Classic Summer Reads For 10th Graders
The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde Oscar Wilde brings his enormous gifts for astute social observation and sparkling prose to The Picture of Dorian Gray, his dreamlike story of a young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty. This dandy, who remains forever unchanged—petulant, hedonistic, vain, and amoral—while a painting of…
Classic Summer Reads For 9th Graders
A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .” With these famous words, Charles Dickens plunges the reader into one of history’s most explosive eras—the French Revolution. From the storming of the Bastille to the relentless drop of the guillotine, Dickens vividly…
6-8th Grade Summer Reading (Part 2)
Counting By 7s Holly Goldberg Sloan In the tradition of Out of My Mind, Wonder, and Mockingbird, this is an intensely moving middle grade novel about being an outsider, coping with loss, and discovering the true meaning of family. Willow Chance is a twelve-year-old genius, obsessed with nature and diagnosing medical conditions, who finds it…
6-8th Grade Summer Reading (Part 1)
Brown Girl Dreaming Jacqueline Woodson Jacqueline Woodson, one of today’s finest writers, tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing verse. Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the…