Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Having a love for reading is a key to language and literacy development. It doesn't really matter what you read -- fiction or nonfiction, novels or newspapers, stories or blogs. It is just essential to want to read and to read a lot. What fiction do you love? What are your favorite novels, plays, and stories? I have listed my favorite novels below. Have you read any of them? When did you last curl up with your favorite reading?

My Top Twenty Novels (in alphabetical order)

A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) by Franz Kafka

Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin

Faust by Johann Wolfgang Goethe

Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

L’Etranger (The Stranger) by Albert Camus

Lord of the Rings by Tolkien

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte



Vocabulary

fiction -- (noun) writing that is not true

nonfiction -- (noun) writing that is true, such as a newspaper report

novel -- (noun) a long book that is not true, such as a short story

blog -- (noun) web log, a journal on the internet

essential -- (adjective) important, necessary

curl up -- (verb) lie down in a circular position, often to read

Exercise:

1. To earn money it is ___________________ to work hard.

2. She love writing on the internet and has her own __________.

3. The little girl _________________ on the couch with her favorite book.

4. He reads newspapers online all day because he likes_____________________ better than _______________.

5. When I retire, I want to write a _______________ about people from another planet.

Grammar Point:

Interrogatives are questions. What do you notice about the form of a question in English? Write 3 questions of your own about reading.


7 comments:

dpanucci said...

I love your list of books. I found some of my favorite books there. I might steal this idea for a later blog.

Teacher: Jackie said...

Why not?
Feel free to use my idea.

Daisy Weinstein said...

Hi Jackie,

I admired your list of books!!! I look forward to reading some of them in the near future!
I agree that a love of reading is crucial for language development and acquisition. I recently started to read for personal enjoyment and it is such a wonderful experience to connect and "curl up with a good book".

Daisy Weinstein said...

Hi Jackie! I admired your list of books, what a collection! I look forward to reading some of them in the near future. I recently started to read for personal enjoyment and it is a great experience to "curl up" with a good book!

Joan said...

I love these books...Tolkien and C.S. Lewis are two of my favorites since childhood! My father used to read "The Hobbit" to me before I went to bed, and now I just have an abiding love for that and for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The photo looks like me...I always curl up to read like that! There's almost nothing else I'd rather be doing!

Joan said...

I love these books...Tolkien and C.S. Lewis are two of my favorites since childhood! My father used to read "The Hobbit" to me before I went to bed, and now I just have an abiding love for that and for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The photo looks like me...I always curl up to read like that! There's almost nothing else I'd rather be doing!

Jessica Wodicka said...

I love to read, always have. I agree that a love of reading is essential to developing literacy. That's why I think it is important for us, as teachers, to work to instill the love of reading in children by making reading fun. exciting and interesting. I definitely want to check out some of the books on your list on my next trip to the library!