Fourth Grade Suggested Reading List

By Christina Diaz Gonzalez & Gabriela Epstein
How can you be yourself when no one sees the real you? Five students meet in the school cafeteria when they're forced to complete their school community service hours. There's George: the brainSara: the lonerDayara: the tough kid Nico: the rich kid and Miguel, the jock. They immediately know that they have nothing in common with each other... even though their school administration has decided that they all belong together. None of the kids wants to be there, and each has their own issues they're dealing with in their life outside of school. But when they encounter someone who truly needs their help, they might just be able to come together to work as a team—and help their community—after all.

By Gordon Korman
The morning after Hurricane Leo rips through the town of Canaan, residents awaken to widespread destruction—power outages, downed branches, uprooted trees, broken windows and damaged roofs. Four eighth-grade friends—Evan, Jason, Mitchell, and CJ—meet to explore the devastation. The tight-knit group is dismayed to find that Evan has brought along a stray—Ricky, who is new to their town and school, and doesn’t have any friends yet.Ricky is the one to find the strange trap door that’s appeared in the middle of the woods—the door to an old bomb shelter, unearthed by the hurricane. Inside, the boys find a completely intact underground lair, complete with electricity, food, and entertainment (in the form of videocassettes). The boys vow to keep the place’s existence to themselves.Things soon get tense. Some bad locals keep snooping around. And what started out as a fun place to escape soon becomes a serious refuge for one of the kids who is trying to avoid an abusive home situation. In order to save the shelter, the friends must keep its secret... and in order to save themselves, they’re going to have to share their individual secrets, and build the safest place they can.

By Deborah Hopkinson
Ruth David was growing up in a small village in Germany when Adolf Hitler rose to power in the 1930s. Under the Nazi Party, Jewish families like Ruth's experienced rising anti-Semitic restrictions and attacks. Just going to school became dangerous. By November 1938, anti-Semitism erupted into Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, and unleashed a wave of violence and forced arrests.Days later, desperate volunteers sprang into action to organize the Kindertransport, a rescue effort to bring Jewish children to England. Young people like Ruth David had to say good-bye to their families, unsure if they'd ever be reunited. Miles from home, the Kindertransport refugees entered unrecognizable lives, where food, clothes -- and, for many of them, language and religion -- were startlingly new. Meanwhile, the onset of war and the Holocaust visited unimaginable horrors on loved ones left behind. Somehow, these rescued children had to learn to look forward, to hope.Through the moving and often heart-wrenching personal accounts of Kindertransport survivors, critically acclaimed and award-winning author Deborah Hopkinson paints the timely and devastating story of how the rise of Hitler and the Nazis tore apart the lives of so many families and what they were forced to give up in order to save these children.

By Kacen Callender
Twelve-year-old Kingston James is sure his brother Khalid has turned into a dragonfly. When Khalid unexpectedly passed away, he shed what was his first skin for another to live down by the bayou in their small Louisiana town. Khalid still visits in dreams, and King must keep these secrets to himself as he watches grief transform his family.It would be easier if King could talk with his best friend, Sandy Sanders. But just days before he died, Khalid told King to end their friendship, after overhearing a secret about Sandy-that he thinks he might be gay. "You don't want anyone to think you're gay too, do you?"But when Sandy goes missing, sparking a town-wide search, and King finds his former best friend hiding in a tent in his backyard, he agrees to help Sandy escape from his abusive father, and the two begin an adventure as they build their own private paradise down by the bayou and among the dragonflies. As King's friendship with Sandy is reignited, he's forced to confront questions about himself and the reality of his brother's death.

By Miles Gross and Shaz Enrico
Tyrell is a funny, imaginative 11 year-old-heading into his final year at Marcus Garvey Elementary. But soon after he starts, his high hopes that being a 6th grader and now one of the oldest kids in the school will automatically make him one of the coolest and wisest kids around pretty much go POOF!For starters, SOMETHING seems to be going on with his best friend, Boogie. He’s just not himself. Plus, schoolwork is uh, way harder than maybe he thought it would be. And to make things worse, there’s a school show coming up at the end of the year that Tyrell is terrified of! Of course, it’s not all bad. A pack of rabbits gets loose in the school. And when Principal Davis fell asleep with the intercom on, snoring for all the school to hear? Priceless. Tyrell relives these events and copes with all this stress the only way he knows how ― through his imaginary “podcast” recording sessions held on the floor of his bedroom, often with his lovable bulldog Monty at his side.Tyrell Show is a perfect series for anyone who’s ever held their own talk show on a bedroom floor with a tape recorder, iPad, or computer at their side. This highly illustrated coming-of-age series starring young African American boys is sure to put a smile on the face of anyone who picks it up.

By Angie Thomas
It’s not easy being a Remarkable in the Unremarkable world. Some things are cool—like getting a pet hellhound for your twelfth birthday. Others, not so much—like not being trusted to learn magic because you might use it to take revenge on an annoying neighbor.All Nic Blake wants is to be a powerful Manifestor like her dad. But before she has a chance to convince him to teach her the gift, a series of shocking revelations and terrifying events launch Nic and two friends on a hunt for a powerful magic tool she’s never heard of...to save her father from imprisonment for a crime she refuses to believe he committed.

By Liam Francis Walsh
Peggy is scared: She's struggling to recover from polio and needs crutches to walk, and she and her neighbors are worried about the rumors of Communist spies doing bad things. On top of all that, Peggy has a hard time at school, and gets taunted by her classmates. When she finds a mysterious artifact that gives her the ability to fly, she thinks it's the solution to all her problems. But if Peggy wants to keep it, she'll have to overcome bullies, outsmart FBI agents, and escape from some very strange spies! A Graphic Novel

By Judy Blume
Two is a crowd when Peter and his little brother, Fudge, are in the same room. Grown-ups think Fudge is absolutely adorable, but Peter and his pet turtle, Dribble, know the truth. From throwing temper tantrums to smearing mashed potatoes on the wall, Fudge causes mischief wherever he goes!“As a kid, Judy Blume was my favorite author, and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing was my favorite book.”—Jeff Kinney, author of the bestselling Wimpy Kid series

By Edwidge Danticat
It is election time in Haiti, and bombs are going off in the capital city of Port-au-Prince. During a visit from her home in rural Haiti, Celiane Espérance and her mother are nearly killed. Looking at her country with new eyes, Celiane gains a fresh resolve to be reunited with her father in Brooklyn, New York.The harsh winter and concrete landscape of her new home are a shock to Celiane, who witnesses her parents' struggle to earn a living and her brother's uneasy adjustment to American society, and at the same time encounters her own challenges with learning and school violence.National Book Award finalist Edwidge Danticat weaves a beautiful, honest, and timely story of the American immigrant experience in this luminous novel about resilience, hope, and family.

By Pam Munoz Ryan and Peter Sis
From the time he is a young boy, Neftalí hears the call of a mysterious voice. Even when the neighborhood children taunt him, and when his harsh, authoritarian father ridicules