The Weatherford High School English Department is excited to introduce you to our Pre-AP/AP Summer Reading Program. Our goal is to provide students with an opportunity to expand the canon of their literary study in preparation for their Pre-AP English II course. The program will reinforce close reading skills and instigate analytical thinking and discussion in forums to prepare students for an immediate entry into the rigorous college-preparatory curriculum of this course.
Required Reading:
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Students can acquire this book from Amazon.com, new or used. Students needing financial assistance in purchasing the book should notify their current English teacher as soon as possible.
We will be utilizing the Remind101 texting system to send out messages and questions on topics that we would like students to consider and annotate as they are reading. We ask that you allow your child to join Remind101 to receive the messages sent out by the Pre-AP teachers throughout the summer. Instructions on how to sign up for this service are included with this letter. In addition, we will be posting blog entries throughout the summer to foster thinking and academic discussion as the students are reading the novel. The blog entries during the summer can be found at www.jamesenglish2preap.weebly.com under the Summer Reading Tab. You will be required to respond to a blog entry by the end of the first week of school, and will count as part of your grade in the first six weeks.
The skill instruction and practice in class will begin immediately next fall, with the summer reading text as a thematic, topical, and textual resource for reading, analysis, evaluation, and writing. The text will serve as the impetus for discussion, instruction, skill practice, and writing in those first weeks. While class will begin with the understanding that everyone will have read and be prepared to discuss Of Mice and Men, written assessments of the reading will take place by the end of the third week of school. Within the first week of school, we will be taking an AP-style Multiple Choice Test over the novel.