Overview
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Summer Reading Requirements
All scholars are required to read three books and complete a log or summary for each book during the summer months. Scholars in Grades PreK-3 must read the required summer reading book and select two titles from a list of ten and complete a log or summary of each book read during the summer months. Scholars in grades 4-12 must read the required summer reading book and select to read by choice or preference from a list of categories of books from any source and complete a log or summary of each book read during the summer months.
Examples of Different Types of Text
- SJ Social justice
- GF Graphic Fiction
- GN Graphic Nonfiction
- FAN Fantasy, Romance
- MO Moral Lesson
- LA Local Authors
- HU Funny, Humor
- SP Skills to practice with adult supervision (cookbooks, knitting, gardening)
- $$ Recommended for aspiring entrepreneurs.
After completing the minimum of three books, scholars are encouraged to continue reading and writing logs or summaries. Summer reading is fun and helps students grow academically.
Scholars who read and write logs/summaries on more than three books will earn additional incentives.
Required Titles for Grades K-12
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PRE-K - Kindness Makes Us Strong | Sophie Beer
Kindness is a friendly hello. A roaring cheer. A quick boost. Kindness is what makes us strong! This joyful board book shows various children as they extend kindness in all kinds of situations: on the playground, at lunchtime, on a bike path, and on a neighborhood street. This sweet preschool read-aloud shows the way kindness helps build friendship and community.
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K - Goodbye, Friend! Hello, Friend! | Cori Doerfield
Change and transitions are hard, but Goodbye, Friend! Hello, Friend! demonstrates how, when one experience ends, it opens the door for another to begin. It follows two best friends as they say goodbye to snowmen, and hello to stomping in puddles. They say goodbye to long walks, butterflies, and the sun...and hello to long evening talks, fireflies, and the stars. But the hardest goodbye of all comes when one of the friends has to move away. Feeling alone isn't easy, and sometimes new beginnings take time. But even the hardest days come to an end, and you never know what tomorrow will bring.
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GRADE 1 - The Day You Begin | Jaqueline Woodson
There will be times when you walk into a room and no one there is quite like you.
There are many reasons to feel different. Maybe it's how you look or talk, or where you're from; maybe it's what you eat, or something just as random. It's not easy to take those first steps into a place where nobody really knows you yet, but somehow you do it. -
GRADE 2 - Me & Mama | Cozbi A. Cabrera
On a rainy day when the house smells like cinnamon and Papa and Luca are still asleep, when the clouds are wearing shadows and the wind paints the window with beads of water, I want to be everywhere Mama is.
With lyrical prose and a tender touch, the Caldecott and Coretta Scott King Honor Book Mama and Me is an ode to the strength of the bond between a mother and a daughter as they spend a rainy day together.
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GRADE 3 - The Ember Stone | Katrina Chapman
Perodia is threatened by Thorn, a powerful vulture, who is using magic to spread a terrible darkness--but when a young owl named Tag, and his best friend, the squirrel Skyla, rescue a golden egg from Thorn's Tiger bats they may have found the key to Perodia's salvation: the last firehawk, guardian of the ember stone.
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GRADE 4 - A Boy Called Bat | Elana Arnold
For Bixby Alexander Tam (nicknamed Bat), life tends to be full of surprises, some of them good, some not so good. Today, though, is a good-surprise day. Bat's mom, a veterinarian, has brought home a stray baby skunk, which she needs to take care of until she can hand him over to a wild-animal shelter. But the minute Bat meets the kit, he knows they belong together. And he s got one month to show his mom that a baby skunk might just make a pretty terrific pet
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GRADE 5 - Becoming Naomi Leon | Pam Munoz Ryan
When Naomi's absent mother resurfaces to claim her, Naomi runs away to Mexico with her great-grandmother and younger brother in search of her father
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GRADE 6 - March:Book One | John Lewis
March is a vivid first-hand account of John Lewis' lifelong struggle for civil and human rights, meditating in the modern age on the distance traveled since the days of Jim Crow and segregation. Rooted in Lewis' personal story, it also reflects on the highs and lows of the broader civil rights movement.
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GRADE 7 - Clayton Byrd Goes Underground | Rita Williams-Garcia
Clayton feels most alive when he's with his grandfather, Cool Papa Byrd, and the band of Bluesmen -- he can't wait to join them, just as soon as he has a blues song of his own. But then the unthinkable happens. Cool Papa Byrd dies, and Clayton's mother forbids Clayton from playing the blues. And Clayton knows that's no way to live. Armed with his grandfather's brown porkpie hat and his harmonica, he runs away from home in search of the Bluesmen, hoping he can join them on the road. But on the journey that takes him through the New York City subways and to Washington Square Park, Clayton learns some things that surprise him.
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GRADE 8 - The Seventh Most Important Thing| Shelley Pearsall
"In 1963, thirteen-year-old Arthur is sentenced to community service helping the neighborhood Junk Man after he throws a brick at the old man's head in a moment of rage, but the junk he collects might be more important than he suspects. Arthur is given a rickety shopping cart and a list of the Seven Most Important Things: glass bottles, foil, cardboard, pieces of wood, lightbulbs, coffee cans, and mirrors. He can’t believe it—is he really supposed to rummage through people’s trash? But it isn’t long before Arthur realizes there’s more to the Junk Man than meets the eye, and the “trash” he’s collecting is being transformed into something more precious than anyone could imagine.
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GRADE 9 - Fahrenheit 451 | Ray Bradbury
Guy Montag is a fireman. 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 when 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, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.
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GRADE 10 - All American Boys | Jason Reynolds
A bag of chips. That's all sixteen-year-old Rashad is looking for. What he finds instead is a fist-happy cop, Paul, who mistakes Rashad for a shoplifter, mistakes Rashad's pleadings that he's stolen nothing for belligerence, mistakes Rashad's every flinch at every punch the cop throws as further resistance and refusal to STAY STILL as ordered. But how can you stay still when someone is pounding your face into the pavement?
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GRADE 11 - Born A Crime | Trevor Noah
The comedian traces his coming of age during the twilight of apartheid in South Africa and the tumultuous days of freedom that followed, offering insight into the farcical aspects of the political and social systems of today's world.
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GRADE 12 - Sing, Unburied, Sing | Jesmyn Ward
Jojo is thirteen years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. He doesn’t lack in fathers to study, chief among them his black grandfather, Pop. But there are other men who complicate his understanding: his absent White father, Michael, who is being released from prison; his absent White grandfather, Big Joseph, who won’t acknowledge his existence; and the memories of his dead uncle, Given, who died as a teenager.
Required Titles for J-TECHS
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Grade 9 - The Cost of Knowing | Brittney Morris
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Grade 10 - Promise Boys| Nick Brooks
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Grade 11 - The Vanishing Half | Brit Bennett
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Grade 12 - Sing, Unburied, Sing |Jesmyn Ward
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Required Titles for Advanced Learning Programs & Services
(Casey, Barack Obama, McWillie, Power, Bailey, Northwest, Forest Hill, Jim Hill, and Murrah)
GRADE
TITLE
AUTHOR
K
Lola Loves Stories
Anna McQuinn
1
Daniel Finds A Poem
Micha Archer
2
My Name is Yoon
Helen Recorvits
3
Wedgie & Gizmo
Suzanne Selfors
4
The Crossover
Kwame Alexander
5
Firegirl
Tony Abbott
6 (APAC/IB)
Look Both Ways
Jason Reynolds
7 (APAC/IB)
Flying Lessons & Other Stories
Ellen Oh
8 (APAC/IB)
Animal Farm
George Orwell
9 (AP)
I am Malala
Malala Yousafzai
9 (AP)
Long Way Down
Jason Reynolds
9 (AP)
The Moon is Down
John Steinbeck
9 (IB)
Speak
Laurie Halse Anderson
9 (IB)
Long Way Down
Jason Reynolds
10 (AP)
Gathering of Old Men
Ernest Gaines
10 (AP)
The Poet X
Elizabeth Acevedo
10 (AP)
Persepolis, Book 1
Marjane Satrapi
10 (IB)
Kindred
Octavia Butler
11 (AP)
1984
George Orwell
11 (AP) Nonfiction Choice
11 (AP)
The Jungle
Upton Sinclair
11 (AP)
Fast Food Nation
Eric Schlosser
11 (AP)
The New Jim Crow
Michelle Alexander
11 (AP)
The Beauty Myth
Naomi Wolf
11 (AP)
In Cold Blood
Truman Capote
11 (AP) Memoir Choice
11 (AP)
Becoming
Michelle Obama
11 (AP)
Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates
11 (AP)
Born A Crime
Trevor Noah
11 (AP)
Long Way Gone
Charles Martin
11 (AP)
Memorial Drive
Natasha Trethewey
11 (IB)
Required
11 (IB)
How To Read Literature Like a Professor
Thomas C. Foster
11 (IB)
Siddhartha
Herman Hesse
12 (AP)
The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver
12 (AP)
World of Wonders
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
12 (AP) AP Classic Novel Choice
12 (AP)
Wuthering Heights
Emily Bronte
12 (AP)
Go Tell It on the Mountain
James Baldwin
12 (AP)
The Color Purple
Alice Walker
12 (AP)
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
12 (AP)
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
12 (AP)
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
12 (IB) Required
12 (IB)
King Lear
William Shakespeare
12(IB)
Woman at Point Zero
Nawal El Saadawi
Note: Program schools may recommend that additional books are read during the summer in preparation for coursework during the upcoming school year. Those listed above are the minimum books required by the District for each grade level and program school.
Summer Reading Links
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630 South State Street
Jackson, MS 39201
Phone: (601) 960-8320Dr. Samecia Stokes
TRC/Director of Library Services
Downloads
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Audio Book
Families and students may use the following links to search for the audiobook version of the summer reading book.
Please note THERE MAY BE A CHARGE to download or access audiobooks and NOT all summer reading books may be available in an audio format.