Summer Reading 📘 Jennifer's Book Recommendations ☀️Improve Your English Vocabulary

Hi everyone. It's Jennifer and it's now officially summer vacation for all students.

Of course, the older you get, the more teachers expect you not to slack off over the summer.

Do you know what "slack off" means?

It means to get a little lazy and make less of an effort.

Well, my children will not be allowed to slack off over the summer because they received their summer reading lists, and my daughter also

has a math packet to complete, so they're not entirely free from schoolwork.

Did you ever receive a summer reading list at school?

Well, what I like about the list that my children got is that there's a degree of choice.

They can select titles from a list of teacher recommendations.

It's always easier to read when you're genuinely interested in the content, isn't it?

I'd like to see you stay busy, too, over the summer with your English studies, of course.

By the end of this video, you'll have a list of my recommendations for summer reading.

So get ready to take some notes.

Summer reading is a way to keep up your skills: vocabulary,

grammar, your ability to think and reflect in English.

Summer reading is supposed to be enjoyable. So that's the kind of reading I'd like you to do over the next two months.

Read to practice your English, but read for fun.

There are some websites with free text at different levels.

You'll find graded readings on ReadTheory.org and ReadWorks.org.

Both these sites offer

informational texts and short stories.

I like that ReadTheory.org starts with the test to determine your level, and I like how ReadWorks.org

has audio recordings to go along with the texts. Both sites offer questions to test your comprehension.

If you're a beginner, you can read texts at the early grade levels, K through 1.

That's kindergarten and first grade.

If you're an intermediate student, you should be comfortable reading texts at slightly higher grade levels.

I have intermediate private students who are reading text at the fifth, sixth, and seventh grade levels.

Advanced students should be able to read texts at the high school level. That's 9th through 12th grades.

How should you select books? Well, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, it has to be level appropriate.

If you select a book on your own, you might try the same Five-finger Rule that my children learned at school.

You take a book and flip open to any page and look to see how many new words there are.

So if there are zero words, or maybe just one new word, maybe it's easy...

maybe it's too easy and it won't challenge you. If there are two or three new words on the page,

that will offer a bit of a challenge.

Four or five new words per page

might start to increase that challenge, perhaps even too much.

Obviously, if there are 15 to 20 new words or even more on every single page of that book,

It's not level appropriate, the reading experience will become frustrating.

At U.S. public library or online bookstore, you'll find works of nonfiction for young readers:

travel books, biographies,

history books, science books. These books are generally appropriate for adult English language learners too.

Last summer, I checked out books on South Dakota and Wyoming from the children's library.

My kids and I both read through them and that's how we planned part of our trip when we went to South Dakota and Wyoming.

We ended up seeing this missile launch control center from the Cold War era and

also this famous store called Wall Drug, and we learned about these places from travel books!

One popular children's series is the "I Am" series,

which is probably for fourth graders, more or less.

You can read the biographies of famous people like George Lucas, Albert Einstein, and Helen Keller.

A similar series is the "Who Is/ Who Was" series and it's about the same level of difficulty. You can read, for example,

Who Is Barack Obama? or Who Was Amelia Earhart?

Personally, I enjoyed reading historical fiction with my children a few years ago.

We bought, read, and reread the "I Survived" series by Lauren Tarshis. These are fictitious

survival stories based on the most well-known disasters in history, like

Pompeii, the Titanic, and the Hindenburg disaster.

If you like science, for example, space, animals,

geography... you can look at books from publishers like National Geographic.

They have encyclopedias and leveled texts for young readers.

But again, they're appropriate and content for adult English language learners. From their leveled book series,

I'd say Levels 1 & 2 are quite easy.

Level 3 might be appropriate for low intermediate learners.

If you're a high intermediate student of English, you might enjoy young adult fiction.

These are books you will not find in the children's section at a local library. Young Adult fiction is for teenagers.

The themes are more mature, so you'll find them interesting, but the language won't be too difficult.

Why am I recommending fiction? Again, the idea is to read and enjoy it! As you read, you'll learn new vocabulary,

grammar will be reinforced, and conversational expressions will be modeled through the dialogue.

But in general, you just want to expose yourself to English and enjoy the reading experience.

My local librarians recommended a few titles for my 13-year-old son, and out of curiosity

I began to read some of these books myself.

Right now my son is reading Hatchet by Gary Paulsen.

It's a story about a 13-year-old boy

who survives a plane crash and he has to learn how to survive in a forest with only a hatchet, a small ax.

Last week I read a young adult novel called Crunch by Leslie Connor.

It's about a teenage boy who has to help take care of his siblings and run

his father's bicycle business while his parents are stranded. They can't get home because of a fuel shortage.

There's not enough gas for cars to go anywhere in the country.

But one young adult novel, I really enjoyed recently is Michael Vey: The Prisoner of Cell 25.

The author is Richard Paul Evans.

If you like the Hunger Games or the TV series Stranger Things, it's kind of like those.

The main character, Michael Vey, is a fourteen-year-old boy with special electrical powers.

He meets a girl with similar powers and as they discover more about themselves,

they realize they're in great danger.

I just checked out the second book in this series, so I can't wait to read what happens next.

Okay, but what if you're an advanced learner of English?

Well, the recommendations I could give you would depend on what genre you like.

Personally, I enjoy fiction and also historical romance. I have books in my library by Charlaine Harris,

Deborah Harkness, and Linda Lael Miller.

But I also enjoy short stories.

I have a list of seven stories on my WordPress blog, where I share tips and ideas for teachers.

I've read these stories with advanced students, and they're all thought-provoking in their own way.

I'll put the link to that blog post in the video description.

If you search online, you may be able to find copies of those stories.

Again, they're for advanced students. My top two favorite stories on that list are

"Virtuoso" by Herbert Goldstone and

"Truth and Consequences" by Brendan Gill.

A couple of weeks ago, a private student told me about a work of nonfiction, and I just found the book in my local library.

It's called Rising Strong by Brene Brown. I plan to read it on the plane when I go on vacation.

Hopefully, it will prompt some reflection and give me some inspiration.

So now you have a list of recommendations.

Set a realistic goal for yourself.

Can you read at least one book in the next two months? Or if you work with short texts,

can you read 15 to 20 minutes a day a few days a week?

If you follow one of my recommendations,

and you want to tell me what you thought of a story or a book, post a comment later in the summer. Okay?

Right now, you could also go to the comments and share your recommendations. What do you read? And what do you like?

What would you recommend to other learners?

Well, that's all for now. I hope you found my recommendations helpful.

As always, thanks for watching and happy studies! And happy reading!

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