UNIT TITLE |
AUTHOR |
SYNOPSIS |
| I. ADVENTUROUS KIDS | ||
| 1. Going for Oysters | Adams, Jeanie | An Australian aborigine family spends the weekend fishing and looking for oysters, and they almost forget their grandfather’s warning about the dangers of the eastern swamp. |
| 2. Floating Home | Getz, David | To look at her home in a new way for an art project, eight-year-old Maxine rides on a space shuttle, where she experiences the many thrills of takeoff and has the opportunity to indeed view her home, Earth, in an entirely new way. |
| 3. Marven of the Great North Woods | Lasky, Kathryn | When his Jewish parents send him to a Minnesota logging camp to escape the influenza epidemic of 1918, ten-year-old Marven finds a special friend. |
| 4. Mailing May | Tunnell, Michael | In 1914, because her family cannot afford a train ticket to her grandmother’s town, May gets mailed and rides the mail car on the train to see her grandmother. |
| II. CINDERELLA STORIES FROM AROUND THE WORLD | ||
| 1. The Egyptian Cinderella | Climo, Shirley | In this version of Cinderella set in Egypt in the sixth century B.C., Rhodopes, a slave girl, eventually comes to be chosen by the Pharaoh to be his queen. |
| 2. The Golden Sandal: A Middle Eastern Cinderella Story | Hicox, Rebecca | Based on a Cinderella story from Iraq called “The little red fish and the clog of gold” in Inea Bushnaq’s Arab folktales. An Iraqi version of the Cinderella story in which a kind and beautiful girl who is mistreated by her stepmother and stepsister finds a husband with the help of a magic fish. |
| 3. Yeh-Shen: A Cinderella Story from China | Louie, Ai-Ling | A young Chinese girl overcomes the wickedness of her stepsister and stepmother to become the bride of a prince. |
| 4. Rough-Face Girl | Martin, Rafe | In this Algonquin Indian version of the Cinderella story, the Rough-Face Girl and her two beautiful but heartless sisters compete for the affections of the Invisible Being. |
| 5. Cinderella | Perrault, Charles | Traditional Cinderella tale |
| 6. Cendrillon: A Caribbean Cinderella | San Souci, Robert | A Creole variant of the familiar Cinderella tale set in the Caribbean and narrated by the godmother who helps Cendrillon find true love. |
| III. DISABILITIES | ||
| 1. Be Good to Eddie Lee | Fleming, Virginia | Although Christy considered him a pest, when Eddie Lee, a boy with Down’s Syndrome, follows her into the woods, he shares several special discoveries with her. |
| 2. Dad and Me in the Morning | Lakin, Patricia | A deaf boy and his father share a special time as they watch the sun rise at the beach. |
| 3. Knots on a Counting Rope | Martin, Jr, Bill | A grandfather and his blind grandson, Boy-Strength-of-Blue-Horses, reminisce about the young boy’s birth, his first horse, and an exciting horse race. |
| 4. Thank You Mr. Falker | Polacco, Patricia | This is Ms. Polacco’s fictionalized autobiography about growing up learning disabled. Trisha doesn’t know why she is unable to read like the other children in her grade and suffers ostracism and shame. Only when a gifted and compassionate teacher intervenes is she able to unlock the treasure of reading…and come to terms with her fears and longings. (Grades 3-4) |
| 5. A Beautiful Pearl | Whitelaw, Nancy | Although her mind is deteriorating from the effects of Alzheimer’s disease, Grandma presents Lisa with a special gift on her birthday. |
| IV. ENVIRONMENT | ||
| 1. She’s Wearing a Dead Bird on Her Head | Lasky, Kathryn | When women’s hats lavishly bedecked with feathers, wings, and whole dead birds became the rage, Harriet Hemenway and Minna Hall started a movement to stamp out a practice that was making women look absurd–and driving many birds to extinction. This entertaining picture book tells how, in 1896, their grassroots effort became the Massachusetts Audubon Society. |
| 2. And Still the Turtle Watched | MacGill-Callahan, Shelia | A turtle carved in rock on a bluff over the Hudson River by Indians long ago watches with sadness the changes man brings over the years. |
| 3. Dawn | Shulevitz, Uri | Camped for the night by a lake, a boy and his grandfather experience dawn from their row boat. |
| 4. Letting Swift River Go | Yolen, Jane | Relates Sally Jane’s experience of changing times in rural America, as she lives through the drowning of the Swift River towns in western Massachusetts to form the Quabbin Reservoir. |
| V. IMMIGRATION | ||
| 1. Peppe the Lamplighter | Bartone, Elisa | Peppe’s father is upset when he learns that Peppe has taken a job lighting the gas street lamps in his New York City neighborhood. |
| 2. The Feather-Bed Journey | Feder, Paula | As she tries to repair a torn feather pillow, Grandma tells about her childhood in Poland, about the Nazi persecution of Jews during World War II, and about the origin of this special pillow. |
| 3. A Very Important Day | Herold, Maggie | Two-hundred nineteen people from thirty-two different countries make their way to downtown New York in a snowstorm to be sworn in as citizens of the United States. |
| 4. I Was Dreaming to Come to America | In their own words, coupled with hand-painted collage illustrations, immigrants recall their arrival in the United States. Includes brief biographies and facts about the Ellis Island Oral History Project. | |
| 5. Long Way to a New Land | Sandin, Joan | Carl Erik journeys with his family from Sweden to America during the famine of 1868. |
| 6. Long Way Westward | Sandin, Joan | Relates the experiences of two young brothers and their family, immigrants from Sweden, from their arrival in New York through the journey to their new home in Minnesota. |
| VI. MULTICULTURAL | ||
| 1. Manuela’s Gift | Estes, Kristyn Rehling | All Manuela wants for her birthday is a new party dress. This is something her family just can’t afford. After being disappointed about not receiving a new dress, Manuela learns to appreciate the things she does have and celebrates what she has. |
| 2. The Day of Ahmed’s Secret | Heide, Florence Parry | As young Ahmed delivers butane gas to customers all over Cairo, he thinks, I have a secret. All day long, as he maneuvers his donkey cart through streets crowded with cars and camels, down alleys filled with merchants’ stalls, and past buildings a thousand years old, Ahmed keeps his secret safe inside. It is so special, that he can reveal it only to his family when he returns home at the end of the day. |
| 3. Mei-Mei Loves the Morning | Tsubakiyama, Margaret Holloway | A young Chinese girl and her grandfather enjoy a typical morning riding on grandpa’s bicycle to do errands and meet friends in the park. |
| 4. Morning on the Lake | Waboose, Jan Bordeau | A young Ojibway Indian boy and his grandfather venture out into their vast woodlands. They spend the morning in a canoe on the lake, trek high onto a cliff at noon, and hike deep into the woods on a starry night. It is the young boy’s desire to see the animals and react with nature that initiate this journey with his grandfather. |
| 5. Raising Yoder’s Barn | Yolen, Jane | Eight-year-old Matthew tells what happens when fire destroys the barn on his family’s farm and all the Amish neighbors come to rebuild it in one day. |
| VII. PIONEER | ||
| 1. The New Land: A First Year on the Prairie | Reynolds, Marilynn | Tells the story of an immigrant family during their first year of homesteading on the frontier. |
| 2. The Floating House | Sanders, Scott | In 1815, the McClures sail their flatboat from Pittsburgh down the Ohio River and settle in what would later become Indiana. |
| 3. Warm as Wool | Sanders, Scott | When Betsy Ward’s family moves to Ohio from Connecticut in 1803, she brings along a sockful of coins to buy sheep so that she can gather wool, spin cloth, and make clothes to keep her children warm. |
| 4. Nothing Here But Trees | Van Leeuwen, Jean | A close-knit pioneer family carves out a new home amidst the densely forested land of Ohio in the early nineteenth century. |
| 5. Buffalo Thunder | Wittmann, Patricia | When young Karl Isaac heads west with his family in a prairie schooner, he experiences many things but longs to see buffalo. |
| VIII. SEGREGATION HISTORY | ||
| 1. Through My Eyes | Bridges, Ruby | Ruby Bridges recounts the story of her involvement, as a 6-year-old, in the integration of her school in New Orleans in 1960. An icon of the Civil Rights movement, Ruby chronicles each dramatic step of this pivotal event in history. |
| 2. Richard Wright and the Library Card | Miller, William | As boy in the segregated South, author Richard Wright was determined to borrow books from the public library. His story illustrates the power of determination in turning a dream into reality. |
| 3. Freedom Summer | Wiles, Deborah | Set in Mississippi during the summer of 1964, Wiles’s affecting debut children’s book about two boys, one white and the other African-American, underscores the bittersweet aftermath of the passage of the Civil Rights Act. |
| 4. The Other Side | Woodson, Jacqueline | Clover s mom says it isn’t safe to cross the fence that segregates their African-American side of town from the white side where Anna lives. But the two girls strike up a friendship, and get around the grown-ups rules by sitting on top of the fence together. |
| IX. WORLD WAR II | ||
| 1. Nim and the War Effort | Lee, Milly | In her determination to prove that an American can win the contest for the war effort, Nim does something which leaves her Chinese grandfather both bewildered and proud. |
| 2. Just Like New | Manson, Ainslie | A young Canadian girl named Sally is asked at Sunday school to bring a gift from home – something special, “just like new” – to send to children in the Blitz. After agonizing over her choice, Sally decides to send her favorite doll Ann Marie. What kind of home will Ann Marie have? Read the book and find out for yourself. |
| 3. Baseball Saved Us | Mochizuki, Ken | A Japanese American boy learns to play baseball when he and his family are forced to live in an internment camp during World War II, and his ability to play helps him after the war is over. |
| 4. Don’t You Know There’s a War On? | Stevenson, James | The author recalls his efforts to win the Second World War, including planting a victory garden, collecting tin foil, and looking for spies. |
James Prendergast Library
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