This is a great book with jokes about classrooms, sports, food, teachers, and other school subjects.  Kids love jokes and they will love this book with jokes they can understand and tell to their friends.  Very colorful and fun jokes.

9 year-old Suzanne (possibly Great Britain’s Judy Moody counterpart) is supposed to be writing “What I Did on My Summer Vacation” for homework, but instead, rambles on and on about how she wanted a pet hamster, her mother said ‘no’, then let her have one after her Nana dies. After the two ‘girl’  hamsters arrive, Suzanne’s family finds out one of the hamsters is in fact pregnant, not just really really getting fat from overeating. Mother and the pet shop owner discuss the possibility of  hamster Immaculate Conception, which Suzanne doesn’t understand. After the babies are born, they are found died, one adult hamster is missing and the other one is missing a paw. Suzanne and her best friend get the advice of a retired police investigator to help them solve the mystery of how the babies died. And finally it comes full circle back to Suzanne’s homework assignment.

I did enjoy the comical black & white sketches of the hamsters, little taped notes sprinkled on several pages , the little hamster footprints next to each chapter title, and the gutter of each page was illustrated to look like a spiral notebook.

Author Susan Meddaugh’s Martha, the talking dog, retells the story of how Skitzy got into trouble on the thin lake ice while chasing a hockey puck when he was a puppy.

You might not think of summer camp as a place to learn about science but…

Ah, summer camp, a time to have fun in the great outdoors and hear spooky stories at the night campfire.

Loraine, a camp counselor, helps some of the campers learn about the state of matter, on the sly, through clues leading to the discovery of the camp’s mysterious fog zombie. Loraine, also,  reveals how to keep a match dry underwater by trapping it in an air bubble in a container, thus proving air takes up space. How temperature (heating & cooling) effects matter, also, comes into play in solving the zombie mystery.

The reader will find 5 science info “bubbles” interspersed at the appropriate times throughout this informationally entertaining graphic novel.

Includes: two do-at-home with adult supervision experiments.

Green Bible stories are a new take on interpreting the Bible to fit into modern-day life.  Stories such as Noah and the ark, Moses, and Abraham, are all rewritten to apply to today’s conditions.  Lehman-Wilzig has rewritten stories to show that the Bible taught us to recycle, to plan for emergencies, and how to take care of nature so that it takes care of us.  It’s an interesting concept.  Children from families with strong beliefs will find it useful.

There are a total of 20 different journeys in this book, beginning with the start of creation, as told in the Bible.  Each journey takes the reader through time, through the lands near the Mediterranean Sea, where the cradle of religion began.  Main stories and main characters from the Bible are featured.  Inset maps are included to show where the story takes place, as well as a geography tip as to what to expect.  Rowland did a nice job of illustrating how many people think it would have looked like.  The difficult part in reading this book is that each journey is somewhat disconnected.  Yes, they all took place long ago and in the same general vicinity, but Rock leaves out how each story is connected to the one previous to it and the following one.  The timeline is somewhat blurry, so are the differences between fact and fiction.  The success of this book will depend much on the beliefs of the students’ families.

This is a 48 page non-fiction book (AR level 5.7, .5 points) about the history of the Transcontinental Railroad across the US.  The information is presented in a clearly-written manner with a format full of actual photographs and illustrations depicting the subject.  The books in this series are very approachable for kids and even the cover art entices the reader to pick it up and check it out.  The prices is reasonable as well for a hardcover book.

This is a great book about the military using Humvees and how they came to be.  There are interesting fact about the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV).   Student will love to read this and find out more about the vehicle that does so much for the military  not only in our country but in more then 60 nations besides the United States.

This is a cute story moving through the life of two caterpillars.  It may come as a surprise to young readers that they both did not turn into the same thing.  The story has colorful fun pictures and is a quick read.  It is a fun book.

This is a book for children who  are learning to read.  It is a story about a boy, Rico, who has a robot.  They go to the beach to fish but Robot gets bored so he finds a little girl who is building a sand castle and he decides to build one too.

This book has a list of story words in the back, and some information for parents and caregivers in the front.