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Summer Reading

Naples Classical Summer Reading List - Grades (K–12) provided by the Barney Charter School Initiative

Thoughts on Summer Reading

Summer break is primarily for family and leisure.  Ideally, it is a time of rest through which students are rejuvenated for the coming school year.

Options for supplementary reading may be titles typically read in earlier grades during the academic year which students will not have read.  Older students can read things from the elementary school grades, as some children’s literature is frequently profound to more mature readers.  From Kindergarten to Second Grade, books should be primarily read aloud by parents. Some books below are placed in those specific grade levels as extensions of content from the previous year’s curriculum (i.e. Oliver Twist listed in Seventh Grade after students read The Prince and the Pauper in Sixth).

Kindergarten

  • Make Way for Ducklings, Robert McKloskey
  • Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes
  • Dr. Seuss Books
  • Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne
  • When We Were Very Young, A.A. Milne
  • William Steig Books

First Grade

  • The Nutcracker
  • Encyclopedia Brown
  • The Sword in the Tree, Clyde Robert Bulla
  • Paddington Bear, Michael Bond
  • Now We Are Six, A.A. Milne

Second Grade

  • Little House Series, Laura Ingalls Wilder
  • Stuart Little, E.B. White
  • The Mouse and the Motorcycle, Beverly Cleary
  • Roald Dahl Books
  • The Thirteen Clocks, James Thurber
  • Snow Treasure, Marie McSwigan

Third Grade

  • The Trumpet of the Swan, E.B. White
  • Sarah, Plain and Tall, Patricia MacLachlan
  • Mr. Poppers Penguins, Richard Atwater
  • The Thirteen Clocks, James Thurber
  • The Tale of Desperaux, Kate DiCamillo

Fourth Grade

  • Calico Captive, Elizabeth George Speare
  • A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L’Engle
  • Misty of Chincoteague Island, Marguerite Henry
  • The Black Stallion, Walter Farley
  • Where the Red Fern Grows, Wilson Rawls
  • Benjamin West and his Cat Grimalkin, Marguerite Henry

Fifth Grade

  • The Reluctant Dragon, Kenneth Grahame
  • Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry; Mildred D. Taylor
  • Little Lord Fauntleroy, Frances Hodgson Burnett
  • Anne of Green Gables Series or Emily of New Moon Series, L.M. Montgomery
  • Old Yeller, Fred Gipson
  • Heidi, Johanna Spyri
  • The Black Arrow, Robert Lewis Stevenson

Sixth Grade

  • My Side of the Mountain, Jean Craighead George
  • Little Men, Louisa May Alcott
  • White Fang, Jack London
  • Redwall Series, Brian Jacques
  • Captains Courageous, Rudyard Kipling
  • The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien

Seventh Grade

  • Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
  • Watership Down, Richard Adams
  • The Last of the Mohicans, James Fennimore Cooper
  • The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkien

Eighth Grade

  • Ben Hur, Lew Wallace
  • The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo
  • Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott
  • Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

Ninth Grade

  • The Odyssey, Homer (Required Summer Reading)

  • My Ántonia, Willa Cather

  • Billy Budd, Herman Melville

  • The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway

  • Mythology, Edith Hamilton

Eleventh Grade

  • Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift

  • The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

  • The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde

  • And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie

  • Whose Body?, Dorothy Sayers

  • Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

  • All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren

  • Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

Tenth Grade

  • The Clouds, Aristophanes
  • Odes, Horace
  • Georgics, Virgil
  • The Oresteia, Aeschylus
  • The Women of Troy, Euripides
  • More selections from Metamorphoses, Ovid
  • Greek Lyric Poetry of Sapho, Xenophanes, Archilochus, etc.

Twelfth Grade

  • The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

  • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Mark Twain

  • Murder in the Cathedral, T.S. Eliot

  • The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky

  • & Senior Thesis book of choice