Scott O'Dell / 4-6 / Science / Karana, an Indian girl, lives happily with her people on the Island of the Blue Dolphins. It is an island in the Pacific that gets its name from its beautiful shape — from above it looks like a dolphin lying on its side, "with its tail pointing toward...

Jon Scieszka / 3-5 / What if a boring lesson about the food chain becomes a sing-aloud celebration about predators and prey? A twinkle-twinkle little star transforms into a twinkle-less, sunshine-eating-and rhyming Black Hole? What if amoebas, combustion, metamorphosis, viruses, the creation of...

Patricia Polacco / Grades 5-6 / The heart-wrenching true story of Civil War valor in which a 15-year old Yankee soldier, Say, alone and bleeding, is dragged to safety by a fellow Union soldier from the Forty-eighth colored regiment. They are ultimately captured and separated, and Say survived...

Patricia Polacco / Grades 5-6 / When Patricia's Great-Gramma Anna came to America as a child, the only things she brought along from Russia were her dress and the babushka she liked to throw up into the air when she was dancing. Soon enough, though, Anna outgrew the dress and her mother...

Davis Schwartz / Grades 3-5 / Professor X and his dog, Y, teach kids how to count exponentially by powers of 10 (1, 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000, etc.), beginning at 1 and working all the way up to a googol (a 1 followed by 100 zeros) and beyond. Children fascinated by large numbers will be amazed...