This collection contains materials from the DIVerse Families bibliography organized by Grades 3-5.
DIVerse Families is a comprehensive bibliography that demonstrates the growing diversity of families in the United States. This type of bibliography provides teachers, librarians, counselors, adoption agencies, children/young adults, and especially parents and grandparents needing to empower their children with materials that reflect their families.
Browse by Grade Level:
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Strider
Beverly Cleary
Strider has a new habit. Whenever we stop, he places his paw on my foot. It isn't an accident because he always does it. I like to think he doesn't want to leave me. Can a stray dog change the life of a teenage boy? It looks as if Strider can. He's a dog that loves to run; because of Strider, Leigh Botts finds himself running -- well enough to join the school track team. Strider changes Leigh on the inside, too, as he finally begins to accept his parents' divorce and gets to know a redheaded girl he's been admiring. With Strider's help, Leigh finds that the future he once hated to be asked about now holds something he never expected: hope
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Summer Camp Adventure
Marsha Hubler
Having taken a crash course in American Sign Language, Camp Tioga junior counselor Skye tries to communicate with a troublesome camper who is deaf, and when he disappears on horseback into the hills, she and Chad lead the rescue team.
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Summer of a Thousand Pies
Margaret Dilloway
After her father goes to jail, Cady Bennett, twelve, is taken from foster care to spend a summer with her estranged Aunt Michelle, trying to save her failing pie shop.
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Sunshine Picklelime
Pamela Ferguson
PJ Picklelime can talk to birds, hear bells ringing in a woman's curls, and spot moonbows in the night sky, but when a close friend dies and her parents separate, she searches for understanding and a way to recover her sunshine.
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Sweethearts of Rhythm
Marilyn Nelson
A look at a 1940's all-female jazz band, that originated from a boarding school in Mississippi and found its way to the most famous ballrooms in the country, offering solace during the hard years of the war.
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Switch
Ingrid Law
Gypsy Beaumont's magical savvy switches to its opposite when she learns that her mean and decidedly non-magical grandma has Alzheimer's and is going to move in with her family.
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T4: A Novel in Verse
Ann Clare LeZotte
When the Nazi party takes control of Germany, thirteen-year-old Paula, who is deaf, finds her world-as-she-knows-it turned upside down, as she is taken into hiding to protect her from the new law nicknamed T4.
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Take Me with You
Carolyn Marsden
Raised in an Italian orphanage in the years following World War II, a biracial girl named Susanna and her best friend Pina want to be adopted but fear being separated.
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Tan to Tamarind: Poems About the Color Brown
Malathi Michelle Iyengar
Poems in celebration of brown skin color.
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Tell Me
Joan Bauer
Feeling scared and powerless when her father's anger escalates and her parents separate, twelve-year-old Anna spends the summer with her grandmother and decides to make a difference when she sees what seems to be a girl held against her will.
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The 12 Dares of Christa
Marissa Burt
Thirteen-year-old Christa's plans for her favorite holiday are derailed when her parents announce their divorce and Christa spends Christmas in Europe with her mom, but even though her dad remains in Chicago, he sends Christa on a scavenger hunt made up of dares that send her all over Florence, Paris, and London.
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The Accidental Adventures of India McAllister
Charlotte Agell
India, an unusual nine-and-a-half-year-old living in small-town Maine, has a series of adventures which bring her closer to her artist-mother, strengthen her friendship with a neighbor boy, and help her to accept the man for whom her father moved away.
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The American Wei
Marion Hess Pomeranc
When Wei Fong loses his first tooth while going to his family's naturalization ceremony, many soon-to-be Americans join in the search.
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The Ballad of Knuckles McGraw
Lois J. Peterson
After Kevin's mother abandons him, he takes refuge in his fantasy of becoming a cowboy, but his reality is a foster home and grandparents he doesn't know.
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The Berenstain Bears and the Wheelchair Commando
Stan Berenstain and Jan Berenstain
Harry, a new student at Bear Country School who is disabled and uses a wheelchair, has trouble making friends until the others discover that he is really very much like them.
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The Big House
Carolyn Coman
When Ivy and Ray's parents are sent to jail, and they are left in the custody of their parent's accusers, they decide to look for evidence that will "spring" their parents.
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The Blossoming Universe of Violet Diamond
Brenda Woods
A biracial girl finally gets the chance to meet the African American side of her family."
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The Book of Boy
Catherine Gilbert Murdock
In 1350, a boy with a large hump on his back becomes the servant of a shadowy pilgrim on his way to Rome, who pulls the boy into a dangerous expedition across Europe to gather the seven precious relics of Saint Peter.
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The Boy on Cinnamon Street
Phoebe Stone
A story about a wounded girl and the boy who won't give up on her. 7th grader Louise should be the captain of her school's gymnastics team - but she isn't. She's fun and cute and should have lots of friends - but she doesn't. And there's a dreamy boy who has a crush on her - but somehow they never connect. Louise has everything going for her - so what is it that's holding her back? Phoebe Stone tells the winning story of the spring when 7th grader Louise Terrace wakes up, finds the courage to confront the painful family secret she's hiding from - and finally get the boy.
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The Cardboard Kingdom
Chad Sell
Welcome to a neighborhood of kids who transform ordinary boxes into colorful costumes, and their ordinary block into cardboard kingdom. This is the summer when sixteen kids encounter knights and rogues, robots and monsters—and their own inner demons—on one last quest before school starts again. In the Cardboard Kingdom, you can be anything you want to be—imagine that! The Cardboard Kingdom was created, organized, and drawn by Chad Sell with writing from ten other authors: Jay Fuller, David DeMeo, Katie Schenkel, Kris Moore, Molly Muldoon, Vid Alliger, Manuel Betancourt, Michael Cole, Cloud Jacobs, and Barbara Perez Marquez. The Cardboard Kingdom affirms the power of imagination and play during the most important years of adolescent identity-searching and emotional growth.
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The Case of the Stolen Scarab
Nancy Garden
After the Taylor-Michaelson family buys and old inn in Vermont, they attempt to solve a case involving a stolen scarab.
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The Cook's Family
Laurence Yep
As her parents' arguments become more frequent, Robin looks forward to the visits that she and her grandmother make to Chinatown, where they pretend to be an elderly cook's family, giving Robin new insights into her Chinese heritage.
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The Crazy Man
Pamela Porter
It is 1965, and 12-year-old Emaline, living on a wheat farm, must deal with a family that is falling apart. When her dog, Prince, chases a hare into the path of the tractor, she chases after him, and her father accidentally runs over her leg, leaving her with a long convalescence and a permanent disability. Even worse, from Emaline’s point of view, is that in his grief and guilt, her father shoots Prince and leaves Emaline and her mother on their own. Despite the neighbors’ disapproval, Emaline’s mother hires Angus, a patient from the local mental hospital, to work their fields. Angus is a red-haired giant whom the local children tease and call "the gorilla." Though the small town’s prejudice creates a cloud of suspicion around Angus that nearly results in tragedy, he just may hold the key to Emaline's coming to grips with her injury and the loss of her father.
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The Dagger Quick
Brian Eames
Twelve-year-old Christopher "Kitto" Wheale, a clubfooted boy seemingly doomed to follow in the boring footsteps of his father as a cooper in seventeenth-century England, finds himself on a dangerous seafaring adventure with his newly discovered uncle, the infamous pirate William Quick.
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The Day Joanie Frankenhauser Became a Boy
Francess Lin Lantz
Tired of gender stereotyping at home, in the classroom, and especially on the football field, ten-year-old Joanie pretends to be a boy when her family moves to a new town, but soon finds there are unexpected consequences.