Students of Vilnius Jonas Basanavičius pre-gymnasium participated in a project, called Born to Read. “Reading Circles”. They read books of famous writers, made chapter summaries, analyzed the characters and the plots for six months.

Name of the task: Writing a summary

Level: A2/B1

Age: 10+

Time: 1-2 months

Resources needed: Computer/laptop/smartphone

Aim: to improve reading and writing skills, stimulate students’ imagination and encourage them to love literature.

Description: students work individually or in pairs/groups to create a summary of a story they read. They also analyse the main characters of the story and illustrate them.

Procedure: First, students read the stories of famous writers, then write and illustrate summaries. They can also draw the pictures to illustrate the main characters of the story.

Notes: This task is very useful to encourage students to read. It also helps to improve grammar skills particularly the use of past tenses.

As a final result: students, individually and in groups, shared their presentations on zoom orally. Here are some of the final results. Gallery – Gerald Durrell “My Family and other Animals”

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The book for reading by Gerald Durrell “My Family and other Animals”

Presentations of our students: Gerald Durrell “My Family and other Animals”

Download (PDF, Unknown)

Download (PDF, Unknown)

immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” “The Picture of Dorian Gray” – a story of a fashionable, evil and scandalous young man named Dorian Gray. He was a beautiful man, but very corrupt and looking only for beauty and material things in his life. This story shows us how young man’s desires can ruin whole his life and what the desires make Dorian Gray to give up for eternal youth and beauty – his soul. The story of Dorian Gray is the most popular Oscar Wilde’s book sold all over the world. In 1890 the tale of Dorian Gray and his immorality caused a big scandal back then. As the author of the novel said, Dorian Gray had a very big moral in himself, but did not explain what exactly he meant. A few years later, Oscar Wilde appeared in trial because of his homosexual liaisons. Everybody started wondering if author portrayed himself as Dorian Gray, O. Wilde had only one answer to that: “Basil Hallward is what I think I am; Lord Henry – what the world thinks of me; Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.”

“She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain. ”

In my opinion, this books is a marvelous piece of art. When I read this book I couldn’t do anything else until I finished it. The story is engaging, has a certain dark and supernatural Gothic period feeling. All in all, this story of Dorian Gray shows people what most people seek more in life – beauty, fame and materialism. But within the lines you can see a lot of beautiful and strong lines about our lives, strong ideas and quotes.

becoming colder and colder, when one evening, the missing body of Rebecca is finally found. After this revelation Maxim has no other choice but to admit to his new wife the truth. Rebecca was a horrid person, who cheated on him constantly and disrespected him through out their whole marriage, so Mr.de Winter lost his patience and shot his wife. After this revelation, a lot of troubles has yet to come to the heroine and her husband, but at least she finally finds peace with herself and shakes off the long stuck Rebeccas image. She once again starts to believe in her husbands love and finds the strength to help him overcome the problems that await.

This book shows us how strongly people love and how love changes them, sometimes for the better,and sometimes for the worse. Our heroine presents us how far one can go for a person they love, how many things they can refuse and leave behind only to have the warmth of a loved person, as well as if you find the right person , many frightening things and situations can become a little less scary with them by your side.

This is a very interesting and gripping story, which is narrated from the author’s (Willa Cather) point of view as one of the main book character’s friend (Jim Burden). “My Antonia” is a novel about a girl (Antonia Shimerda), her hard but joyful life, boy (Jim Burden) who loved her his entire life from all of his heart and beauty of the country they are living in. Antonia is a girl who works as a farmer for half of her life because of her family’s financial situation It’s her brother’s farm and he is responsible for it, but Antonia’s brother (Ambrosch) does not even try to move his finger and find someone who would help him in farming instead of Antonia. Tony (Antonia) Shimerda is a very strong girl who experienced a lot of hard and confusing things in her life: her father’ suicide, heavy field work, boyfriend’s fraud and loneliness. But she still manages to see beauty in other people, stay happy and be thankful of what she has. Everyone should learn how to appreciate what we have and how to be happy every day because we are not doomed yet if we have something to eat or someone by our sides. The title “My Antonia” is with word “My” due to Jim’s inscriptions which were presented in the introduction. This novel is considered as Cather’s first masterpiece and I agree with that because I could nottake my eyes off the book until I finished it. I think everybody should read such an inspiring and beautiful book to find something positive in their lives. I know I did after reading this book. 💡