朗读书单

三年级-四年级

Charles Darwin by Maria Isabel Sanchez Vergara – Series: Little People, Big Dreams

Little Charles lived with his family in Shrewsbury, England, at a time when people didn't know much about the secret life of nature. Had worms always crawled on the ground? He wanted to find out!

Questioning things was natural for the Darwins. They were a family of scientists who thought outside the box. Charles' grandfather was a well-known plant expert and his father was a doctor who hoped his son might follow in his footsteps.

After entering medical school, Charles realized that he wasn't suited for it.Sohe switched subjects and continued to read and learn all about plants.animals and nature.

I am Quiet : a story for the introvert in all of us by Andie Powers 

On the outside,

I build forts out of twigs that are secret spaces for furry friends. I whisper about my day to them and they tell me about theirs. Together we sneak through mazes to look for tasty snacks.

On the outside,

I paint the universe on paper, and there is me, floating through the stars. A tiny astronaut on a great expedition that no one even knows about.

I paint a friend and we float together.

I hear quiet scuttling beneath the earth.

I see quiet nesting in the trees.

I feel quiet burrowing beneath the soil,

an oak tree growing deep in the ground until it breaks free into the light, big and strong.

The Katha Chest by Radhiah Chowdhury

Asiya's favorite quilt is the patchworked one that looks the most different from the others, with strange two-legged shapes making strange two-legged patterns.

She knows it is Maa's because it smells like ink and tomato sauce and home.

Maa and the Khalas take the quilts out of the Katha chest when everyone comes together to drink tea, tell stories, and remember Nanu.

When everyone else is gone and the house is quiet, Maa wraps Asiya tightly in the quilt that is paper-thin with age, and smells like tea and old books and porcelain and wood.

And she tells Asiya the story of Nanu's quilt, the oldest quilt of all.

五年级-六年级

Three Days to See

I who am blind can give one hint to those who see - one admonition to those who would make full use of the gift of sight: Use your eyes as if tomorrow you would be stricken blind. And the same method can be applied to other senses. Hear the music of voices, the song of a bird, the mighty strains of an orchestra, as if you would be stricken deaf to-morrow. Touch each object you want to touch as if tomorrow your tactile sense would fail. Smell the perfume of flowers, taste with relish each morsel, as if tomorrow you could never smell and taste again. Make the most of every sense; glory in all the facets of pleasure and beauty which the world reveals to you through the several means of contact which Nature provides. Then, at last, you would really see, and a new world of beauty would open itself before you.

How to change the world by Rashmi Sirdeshpande 

The Building of the Great Pyramid

Rising up from the Egyptian desert, on the West Bank of the River Nile, stands the Great Pyramid of Giza. Built over 4,500 years ago, it is an

astonishing feat of human engineering. It took thousands of workers 20 years to put together. But how did they manage it?

The pyramid is made up of 2.3 million stone blocks and the smallest ones weigh more than a car! Amazingly, a people that (as far as we know!) hadn't yet discovered wheels, pulleys, or iron tools managed to quarry these blocks, transport them to the construction site, and haul them into place to build a virtually perfect pyramid! It took amazing skill and teamwork.

Ancient Egyptians called it "Ikhet" (glorious light); with its brilliant white stones, the pyramid would have dazzled in the sun. This white limestone came from Tura,8 miles away; the granite for the inside of the pyramid came from Aswan, 500 miles away; and the copper for tools came from across the Red Sea, in Sinai!

Journey to Dream Country

After the mad frobscottle party was over, Sophie settled herself again on top of the enormous table.

‘You is feeling better now?' asked the Big Friendly Giant.

‘Much better, thank you,’ Sophie said.

‘Whenever I is feeling a bit under the weather’ the BFG said, ‘a few gollops of frobscottle is always making me hopscotchy again.'

‘I must say it's quite an experience,' Sophie said.‘It's a razztwizzler,' the BFG said. ‘It's gloriumptious.' He turned away and strode across the cave and picked up his dream-catching net. ‘I is galloping off now,' he said, ‘to catch some more whoppsy-whiffling dreams for my collection. I is doing this every day without missing. Is you wishing to come with me?'

初一-初二

The Alchemist

 In Part One of the novel, Santiago passes the night with his flock of sheep in an abandoned church. That night, he has a recurring dream. When he wakes, he looks forward to the village he will reach in four days where, the year before, he met a girl, the daughter of a merchant. Meeting her made him wish, for the first time in his life, that he could remain in one place. Santiago loves to travel, and became a shepherd, rather than a priest as his family had wanted, because his father told him that, among poor folk, only shepherds had the opportunity to travel.

A few days before reaching the merchant’s daughter’s village, Santiago encounters a fortune-teller, whom he hopes will be able to interpret his recurring dream. In the dream, a child transports Santiago to the Pyramids of Egypt and promises he will find hidden treasure there, but Santiago always wakes up just as the child is about to reveal it. After making Santiago promise to give her one-tenth of the treasure as payment, the fortuneteller interprets the dream to mean that if Santiago journeys to the pyramids, he’ll find hidden treasure.

The many masks of Andy Zhou by Jack Cheng 

  If Cindy's surprised to see me in the auditorium after school, she doesn't show it. Neither does Mx. Adler, who tells us that today, for warm-ups, we're doing Egg again. We scatter on the stage and take our spots on the floor. Knees up, arms wrapped around, head down, eyes closed. I' m small, like always. Tiny, unmoving egg.

But after a while, a weird thing happens. I feel how much I' m squeezing, and straining, just to hold myself small.

So I relax my arms. And it sets off a chain reaction in my body. My shoulders drop, my chest gets looser. My belly, which I was sucking in like I was trying to give myself a six-pack, puffs out like a balloon.

I lean back and plant my hands. I'm crab-walking. Then I bounce to my feet, like someone tied a cord to my chest and pulled me up by it. I start shaking my head and arms, letting my hands flop back and forth, like I'm shaking of something, shaking off every time I've felt bad about Cindy and Jameel and kids that pull their eyes into slits and being a good friend and a good grandson and doing something because of someone else or be- cause I want to do it, because I like doing it, and then I'm crying, but it's not the big crying where you can hardly breathe but a different kind of crying, where tears are just leaking, like snipping the corner off a ziplock bag filled with water.

Harry Potter

It was on the corner of the street that he noticed the first sign of something peculiar -a cat reading a map. For a second, Mr. Dursley didn't realize what he had seen -then he jerked his head around to look again. There was a tabby cat standing on the corner of Privet Drive, but there wasn't a map in sight. What could he have been thinking of? It must have been a trick of the light. Mr. Dursley blinked and stared at the cat. It stared back. As Mr.Dursley drove around the corner and up the road, he watched the cat in his mirror. It was now reading the sign that said Privet Drive——no, looking at the sign; cats couldn't read maps or signs. Mr. Dursley gave himself a little shake and put the cat out of his mind. As he drove toward town he thought of nothing except a large order of drills he was hoping to get that day.

初三及以上

The Mona Lisa vanishes : a legenday painter, a shocking heist, and the birth of a global celebrity by Nicholas Day 

HE MONA LISA WAS BACK.

The story-the theft, the recovery, the noble thief-once again sold newspapers across the world. There were special supplements and extra editions. The Paris newspaper Excelsior even ran a comic-strip-like depiction of Perugia's account- a how-he-did-it illustration of the theft.

In Italy, the appetite was insatiable. "No word is spoken but ‘Gioconda,’" the Rome Tribune wrote. "Nothing is sought but 'Gioconda.’" A wave of patriotism swept across the country. Maybe Vincenzo Perugia was nuts; maybe he was even a little dim-witted. But he'd stolen the Mona Lisa for Italy! The least Italy could do was keep it. Napoleon had stolen it from Italy. The theft was an act of justice!

This righteous story was complicated by the fact that it was . . . well, not true. Napoleon, who'd stolen so much else, hadn't stolen the Mona Lisa-Leonardo himself had taken it to France. The Italian government rejected the cries of many to keep the portrait. "Although the masterpiece is dear to al Italians as one of the best productions of the genius of their race," it announced, "we will willingly return it to its foster country."

The Sherlock Holmes book. Edited by Alexandra Beeden 

Imposter Syndrome

My window looks out onto an air shaft. Still, I can hear the endless honking of car horns over on Roosevelt. I start my homework. AP Calc first, because math is my least favorite subject (I'm only in AB), so I want to get that out of the way. Then AP Geography next.

Before I get started on AP English Lit, I rummage in the kitchen for a snack. Ma's perpetually on a diet, so we have no snacky junk. I find a canister of Planters peanuts in the cupboard above the stove. But the can is sticky with cooking grease and the nuts are stale. I check the expiration date: two years ago. I throw the can away.

I'm dreading dinner tonight because I haven't yet told Ma that I'm applying to Whyder College. Ma's only letting me apply to colleges she's heard of. Which means if it isn't Columbia or Queens College, then forget it. I probably shouldn't have waited until September of senior year to ask her permission. I only told Papi how much I wanted to go to Whyder, and he always encouraged me.

Dream big, Aleja-ya, he used to tell me. You can be anything you want in this country.

The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby is memorable for the rich symbolism that underpins its story. Throughout the novel, the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock is a recurrent image that beckons to Gatsby’s sense of ambition. It is a symbol of “the orgastic future” he believes in so intensely, toward which his arms are outstretched when Nick first sees him. It is this “extraordinary gift for hope” that Nick admires so much in Gatsby, his “heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.” Once Daisy is within Gatsby's reach, however, the “colossal significance” of the green light disappears. In essence, the green light is an unattainable promise, one that Nick understands in universal terms at the end of the novel: a future we never grasp but for which we are always reaching. Nick compares it to the hope the early settlers had in the promise of the New World. Gatsby’s dream fails, then, when he fixates his hope on a real object, Daisy. His once indefinite ambition is thereafter limited to the real world and becomes prey to all of its corruption.