This is a sweet book about a hungry moose who eats a muffin. Then as he grows more comfortable with the child the moose gradually wants more and more things. This book is part of the If You Give series that tells funny stories about animals wanting human things. They are fun books that could be used to talk about cause and effect in a classroom or what sharing looks like. This book could also help independent readers with fluency practice.

This was an amazing read about race, community, and friendship. This book is about two boys, the first a black boy who was beaten for no reason by a police officer and the white boy who witnessed the altercation. This book is (unfortunately) very socially relevant and a good way to introduce a discussion about this issue in the classroom. The story has great voice for both characters, and it really gives you a sense of how difficult this is for every single aspect of the community. There is some swearing in this book so that would have to be filtered if you read it aloud.

This a another cool twist on the classic Cinderella story. This story is told through the eyes of a Native American girl on the shores of Lake Ontario. Her step sisters were cruel and mean to her and made her do all the work just like the typical Cinderella story. All the women in the village wanted to marry the most handsome hunter in the village. The hunter made himself invisible and only the woman who can truly "see" him will be his wife. No one in the village can see him. The Rough Face girl is the only one who can see that his bow is made of a rainbows curve and his sled is made from the milky way and they are soon married. This book tells a classic story in a unique way that emphasizes Native American culture and how it intertwines with nature. The illustrations and vivid vocabulary make this a great read as and adult reading children literature. This could easily be used to talk about social studies and culture.

This book puts a really interesting spin on the classic Cinderella story. It takes place in the spice islands and focuses on a girl named Damura. Her step-mother and step-sisters mistreat her and make her do chores around the house. Then one day as she rode down the river she met Grandmother Crocodile who creates her a sarong and gold silk slippers for the ball. The prince wants her to be his wife but her step-mother and step-sisters push her in the river where she is swallowed by a crocodile. Grandmother crocodile comes to her rescue and saves Damura. The illustrations in this book are beautiful in this twist on Cinderella. I think that this could be used as a great way to show how a different culture tells a familiar story. I would like to own this book and share it with my students.

This is the second book in the Fablehaven series and it was just as engaging and exciting as the first one. In this book Kendra and Seth have returned to their parents house to help fight an evil society that is trying to breach the gates of the preserve to find a magical hidden artifact. This is a series that I would love to read with my kids because its fun and has great dialogue and descriptive language. I was so intrigued by the first book that I have finished the second and plan on reading the third. This book is one that I would absolutely recommend to my students.

This is a fun fantasy book filled with mystery. Its about a twelve year old genius and a child criminal from Dublin Ireland who searches for fairies and their gold. His father is missing from a plane crash and his mothers declining mental health have been a burden for the boy for a long time. He soon meets Holly the first girl on the Leprechaun police force. They work together to overthrow each others personal obstacles. I like this book because it was written at a very sophisticated level and had some dry humor to it. Its interesting and is a cliff-hanging series that could entice students to keep reading further. This is a book I would encourage my students to read for their assigned independent reading or book groups.

I loved this book! This is definitely something that I would read out loud to my class! Its full of fantastical creatures like goblins, satyrs, fairies, nymphs and magic cows! The book is about two children who go to stay with their grandparents for the summer. They soon discover that their grandparents huge stretch of land is a preserve for all sorts of rare and magical creatures and soon they need to help their grandparents keep the creatures safe. I loved the innocent adventure in this story. I also think that kids will be able to identify with the characters in this book. This book is part of a series so hopefully this would be a book that hooks kids into reading more into the series. I would highly recommend this book to students and teachers.

This is a sweet story of friendship between a bear and a hummingbird. In this story Hector the bear gets annoyed with his friend Hummingbird because Hummingbird never stops talking. Hector yells at Hummingbird and travels into the forest alone, and he soon becomes lonely without Hummingbird. However in the end Hummingbird had been following the whole time and was there to surprise Hector when Hector needed him. I think that this would be a great book to use in the classroom to talk about issues in friendships or personal space. This book can be used to start that discussion and use as an example for how to solve problems.

This is the story of Rumpelstiltskin, illustrated in paintings, and narrated simply enough for all ages to enjoy. In this version of the story the girl is a millers daughter who's father brags to the king that she can spin straw to gold. The king steals her and gives her three trails, each room bigger than the last, and filled with straw that she must spin into gold. Her life is in danger if she doesn't spin the straw and Rumpelstiltskin saves her each time. The last time he makes her promise her first born and she agrees. She guesses his name in order to keep her child. This is adapted from the Brothers Grimm fairy tales and is made for kids. Personally, I found this version rich in detail and while it is adapted for children there is still an element of Grimm's Brother's creepiness in the story that I like.

This book is really intricately illustrated, full of both drawings and pictures that makes the "trash" in the book beautiful and interesting. This is the story of a raccoon leaving home and moving into a new house. After gathering odds and ends from the dump to decorate the house he starts to feel lonely. So he goes looking for a friend and finds "mud ball" who becomes his friend and housemate. This story illustrates the process of growing up and meeting new people through lines of rhyming dialogue and creative descriptions. This would be a great story to use in the classroom when talking about personal issues and times of transitions in students lives. I would love this book for my classroom and future students.

This book tells the story of a boy named Billy who stays on an island where everything he reads comes to life! This is a fun story that mixes all sorts of heroes and famous characters like Robin Hood, Jack from Jack and the Beanstalk and Posieden, to create a fun adventure for kids to read. This is a book that I could see myself reading out loud to my students. It mixes fantasy and adventure in an innocent way and I really liked it.

This is a simple and fun graphic novel that has a good lesson. The novel is about the character BabyMouse and she wants more than anything to be popular even if that means being mean to her true friends. The novel tells her story of realizing who her true friends are while providing creative side stories and pictures. I would use this with students to introduce what graphic novels are and show them that there is more than one type of book you can read!

This is a poetry book with all sorts of fun and creative poems that will spark a students imagination. I would use this as a tool in my classroom, every time there was a spare moment or if we had circle time I would read a poem to my students. We could talk about the meaning of each poem and use this as a way to start a creative discussion about meaning and author/character intent.

I love this book and its rhyming scheme! Its a great story about how learning is about thinking and problem solving not taking a test. The message in this book is wonderful and is absolutely something that I will use in my own classroom. There are many opportunities provided by this book that can start a conversation about real learning in the classroom.

This book is about a girl who is suffering from the recent loss of her mother and living with her father in the Kalahari desert. She grew up nomadic and traveling with her parents, and now they need money to continue doing research. To get the money they start a camp where kids from the United States can go to learn about desert life and animals. Soon the kids are stranded on their own. This is a great emotional thriller for students to read. I also like the realistic adventure it brings to a young adult novel. This was not a challenging read, but I think it would be a good way to expand a students pallet when it comes to their reading.

This was a great book that had a great moral to teach in a lesson. The story is about about a man named Androcles who is an escaped slave and a lion. Androcles hears the lion crying and pulls a thorn out of its paw and the two became friends. When Androcles gets captured again and is forced to face a beast in the arena he find out its the lion that he befriended. The emperor is so impressed that he let Androcles and the lion go free. I thought that this book had a great moral, if you are kind to others they will be kind to you. This book had a good flow to it and great illustrations.

This is the version of Snow White as told by the Grimms brothers. It was translated from German by the author. This version of Snow White has more substance that the Disney version that everyone is used to. The queen is more wicked, snow white is even more kind, and the story is slightly more gruesome. What I really liked about this was that while it did have some details that were kind of brutal, they weren't so bad that you couldn't read it to children. I would love to use this in a lesson where I read this book, and then one or two other versions of the same folk/fairy tale and have students compare and contrast. I also loved the illustrations, they were beautiful.

This book is written in musical prose. It gives the reader the opportunity to sing along as its read, or simply read it as poetry. It goes over the history of jazz in America and some of the greatest jazz singers and artists that ever lived. The illustrations are beautifully done and give the book a beautiful symmetry. This book would be interesting to use in a music class or a history lesson when learning about different cultures and music styles in America. I would love to do a unit about different types of music and this would be a great book to introduce the subject.

This book is both history and poetry and its beautiful. Each page is about a famous person or event in black history. It goes over events like Brown V. Board of Education, and what happened at the the Lorraine Motel, and in Birmingham Alabama. It has poems about people like Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Bull Conner. It has a page covering the evil KKK. Each page is covered in beautiful illustrations that depict the oppression suffered by black people in the sixties. I loved this book because the poetry was beautiful and simple. It would be a great book to use when talking about black history and the ugliness of racism in this country while also adding a literary element. This can also be used for an English class studying poetry.

This is a non-fiction book that tells the true and tragic story of the sinking of the Titanic. I liked this book because it was interesting and factual. This book gave facts on how the ship was built with pictures and accurate diagrams of the inside of the ship. The book also gave a detailed account of the people on the ship and who survived. Then it described how the ship sank. This book is a great way for kids to see real pictures of the titanic and get facts on what happened on that tragic night. The pictures are detailed with captions that also give more detail. I can see myself using this in a history lesson.

This book has a very dark humor to it and I liked it a lot. Its about three orphans who's parents die in a fire. The oldest sister is named Violet and she's an inventor. Klaus, the middle child likes to read, and Sonny the baby like to bite things. The orphans are sent to live with their wicked distant cousin Count Olaf who is cruel to the kids. He tries to force/trick Violet into marrying him so that he can have control over their fortune. The kids end up thwarting his plan and are sent to other relatives. This book has a really fun (slightly dark) humor that older kids would find funny. The plot is interesting and the characters are extremely smart and fun to read about when they are trying to think themselves out of impossible situations. This is also one of thirteen books so if a student is interested in the first it would encourage them to keep reading further.

This book is about a boy who finds a stack of letters addressed to him at school. Each letter is from a different color crayon telling them that they feel over worked or are bored at always being used t o draw the same thing. The red crayon talks about how its "even used on Christmas" because red has to color in all the Santa's. Each page in this book is filled with a letter and then with a picture drawn by that color crayon. Its a really creative and visual book that would be good to have in any classroom library.

I read this book in one sitting! I was captivated by the imagination in the story. This book is about a man who crashes his plane in the desert where he meets a boy called the Little Prince. Over the course of several days the prince tells the man about how he lives on a very tine asteroid with three volcanoes on it. He also tells the man that he wants a pet sheep and how he traveled to several other planets on his journey and on each planet was a man.When the boy reached earth he met a flower and befriended a fox and a snake. The boy returns to his planet and leaves the man alone in the desert with a repaired airplane. This is one of the oddest stories I've ever read and yet it was extremely compelling. The characters were interesting and the whole time I wanted to know more about the boy. The book is also instantly appealing to children when the man talks about how much better children are with their imaginations. This is a book I would read out loud to my class.

This is a very sweet book about friendship, love, and loss. The book follows the life of a pig named Wilbur who was going to be killed because he was the runt of the litter but a little girl named Fern saved him and sells him to his uncles farm. On the farm he befriends a spider named Charlotte. Wilbur is entered in the county fair, and Charlotte spins an egg sac full of babies. Unfortunately Charlotte dies, but Wilbur protects her eggs and befriends some of her children after they hatched. I think that this book involves a lot of complex themes for children and introduces them in an innocent way by using animals. This book could be used in a lesson on friendship and the importance of being kind to one another.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians is about a troubled kid with ADD who keeps getting kicked out of private schools. One day he discovers that he is a demigod, half human, half Greek god. He is whisked away to Camp Half-Blood when his mother is kidnapped. At the camp he discovers that he is the son of Poseidon, the god of the seas and is accused of steeling Zeus's lightning bolt. He goes on a quest with his friends Annabeth and Grover (a centaur) to find his mom after hearing a prophecy. The three heroes encounter fantastic creatures and eventually travel to the underworld to clear his name and save his mom. I thought that this book was super creative and fun to read. The plot is interesting and it has really witty dialogue. Another thing that I appreciated about this book was that the characters were relatable. Percy is ADD and has a hard tie in school. Grover is insecure and kind. Annabeth is considered bossy and a know-it-all. All three characters are not perfect and have flaws which I think is easier for kids to relate to. I would definitely recommend this to my future students.