text: I can personally say that teacher-designed summer projects help prepare students for the upcoming school year. Once in middle school, there was a reading project assigned during the summer where students had to pick a book of their choosing that they can connect to and make notes on the side. I decided to choose a book about sports because as an athlete, I could relate to bits of the story. There were a few new things from the book that I learned about, so I wrote little notes on the pages and highlighted the text. After completing the project and returning to school, the teacher then told the class that the purpose of the project was to prepare for annotations, a concept new to students, and to help understand how to compare books that would be read throughout the school year.