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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The Day War Came
Nicola Davies
The day war came there were flowers on the windowsill and my father sang my baby brother back to sleep. Imagine if, on an ordinary day, after a morning of studying tadpoles and drawing birds at school, war came to your town and turned it to rubble. Imagine if you lost everything and everyone, and you had to make a dangerous journey all alone. Imagine that there was no welcome at the end, and no room for you to even take a seat at school. And then a child, just like you, gave you something ordinary but so very, very precious. In lyrical, deeply affecting language, Nicola Davies’s text combines with Rebecca Cobb’s expressive illustrations to evoke the experience of a child who sees war take away all that she knows.
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The Day You Begin
Jacqueline Woodson
Other students laugh when Rigoberto, an immigrant from Venezuela, introduces himself but later, he meets Angelina and discovers that he is not the only one who feels like an outsider.
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The Detective's Assistant
Kate Hannigan
In 1859, eleven-year-old Nell goes to live with her aunt, Kate Warne, the first female detective for Pinkerton's National Detective Agency. Nell helps her aunt solve cases, including a mystery surrounding Abraham Lincoln, and the mystery of what happened to Nell's own father. Includes author's note and bibliographic references.
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The Face at the Window
Regina Hanson
When Dora goes to take a mango from Miss Nella's tree, she is frightened by the woman's strange behavior.
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The Fairies of Nutfolk Wood
Barb Bentler Ullman
After her parents divorce and she moves to the country with her mother, fourth-grader Willa Jane, anxious and unhappy with the changes in her life, discovers a world of little people called Nutfolk living in the woods around her new home.
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The Friends
Kazumi Yumoto
Curious about death, three sixth-grade boys decide to spy on an old man waiting for him to die, but they end up becoming his friends.
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The Good Garden: How One Family Went from Hunger to Having Enough
Katie Smith Milway
Eleven-year-old María Luz and her family have a small farm in Honduras, but may not have enough food to sustain them for the year, so Maria's father must leave home to find work, leaving her in charge of the garden. Includes helpful tips and organizations that are set up to help aid in the global food crisis.
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The Great Gilly Hopkins
Katherine Paterson
Watch out world! The Great Gilly Hopkins is looking for a home. She's a foster kid who's been angry, lonely, and hurting for so long that's she's always ready for a fight. Be on the lookout for her best barracuda smile, the one she saves for well-meaning social workers. Watch out for her most fearful look, a cross between Dracula and Godzilla, used especially to scare shy foster brothers.
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The Great Quarterback Switch
Matt Christopher
Twelve-year-old Michael, confined to a wheelchair after an accident, uses mental telepathy to communicate football plays to his quarterback twin brother Tom, then suddenly finds himself on the field in his brother's place.
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The Grooming of Alice
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
During the summer between eighth and ninth grades, Alice and her friends Pamela and Elizabeth decide to improve themselves through exercise.
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The Harvey Milk Story
Kari Krakow
The story of Harvey Milk, San Francisco's first openly gay city official.
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The Hidden World of Changers #3 The Power Within
H.K. Varian
Darren, Fiona, Mack, and Gabriella are Changers, a magical line of shapeshifters that can transform into mythological creatures, from werewolves and selkies to lightning birds and spirit foxes. They still have a lot to learn when it comes to their powers, but the kids are finally showing some progress fighting as a team, and the First Four think they're ready for a new mission. Young Changers in the area have been mysteriously disappearing, and it's up to the kids to figure out who-or what's behind it. But ever since his parents announced their divorce, Darren has been having a rough time coping-and his lightning abilities are going haywire.
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The Homeless
Gail B. Stewart
Presents first-person accounts of individuals and families who are living as homeless persons in America's cities.
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The House of Hades (The Heroes of Olympus, #4)
Rick Riordan
Greek and Roman demigods from the Prophecy of Seven must work together to seal the Doors of Death--and help Percy and Annabeth escape the Underworld in the process
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The Junkyard Wonders
Patricia Polacco
Inspired by a teacher who believes each of them is a genius, a class of special-needs students invents something that could convince the whole school they are justifiably proud to be "Junkyard Wonders."
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The Kat Sinclair Files #2 Graveyard Slot
Michelle Schusterman
Kat and her friends investigate ghosts in South America, and she finds herself involved in some mysteries that she might not want to unravel.
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The Key to Every Thing
Pat Schmatz
For eleven-year-old Tash, Cap’n Jackie isn’t just the elderly next-door neighbor — she’s family. When she disappears, only Tash holds the key that might bring her back.Tash didn’t want to go to camp, didn’t want to spend the summer with a bunch of strangers, didn’t want to be separated from the only two people she has ever been able to count on: her uncle Kevin, who saved her from foster care, and Cap’n Jackie, who lives next door. Camp turns out to be pretty fun, actually, but when Tash returns home, Cap’n Jackie is gone. And Tash needs her — the made-up stories of dolphin-dragons, the warm cookies that made everything all right after a fight, the key Cap’n Jackie always insisted had magic in it. The Captain always said all Tash had to do was hold it tight and the magic would come. Was it true? Could the key bring Cap’n Jackie back?
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The Lady in the Box
Ann McGovern
It is wintertime in the city and freezing cold, but not everyone is inside and warm. Ben and his sister Lizzie know that there is a lady who lives outside in a box over a warm air vent. Gently told and powerfully illustrated in rich hues, The Lady in the Box deals candidly with the issue of homelessness.
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The Landry News
Andrew Clements
The bad news is that Cara Landry is the new kid at Denton Elementary School. The worse news is that her teacher, Mr. Larson, would rather read the paper and drink coffee than teach his students anything. So Cara decides to give Mr. Larson something else to read: her own newspaper, The Landry News. Before she knows it, the whole fifth-grade class is in on the project. But then the principal finds a copy of The Landry News, with unexpected results. Tomorrow's headline: Will Cara's newspaper cost Mr. Larson his job?
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The Legend of Korra: Ruins of the Empire Part One
Michael Dante DiMartina
On the eve of its first elections, the Earth Kingdom finds its future endangered by its past. Even as Kuvira stands trial for her crimes, vestiges of her imperial ambitions threaten to undermine the nation's democratic hopes. But when Korra, Asami, Mako, and Bolin don't all see eye-to-eye as to the solution, drastic measures will be taken to halt a new march to war!
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The Length of a String
Elissa Brent Weissman
Imani knows exactly what she wants as her big bat mitzvah gift: to find her birth parents. She loves her family and her Jewish community in Baltimore, but she has always wondered where she came from, especially since she's black and almost everyone she knows is white. Then her mom's grandmother--Imani's great-grandma Anna--passes away, and Imani discovers an old journal among her books. It's Anna's diary from 1941, the year she was twelve and fled Nazi-occupied Luxembourg alone, sent by her parents to seek refuge in Brooklyn, New York. Anna's diary records her journey to America and her new life with an adoptive family of her own. And as Imani reads the diary, she begins to see her family, and her place in it, in a whole new way.
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The Liberation of Gabriel King
K. L. Going
In Georgia during the summer of 1976, Gabriel, a white boy who is being bullied, and Frita, an African American girl who is facing prejudice, decide to overcome their many fears together as they enter fifth grade.
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The Line Tender
Kate Allen
Wherever the sharks led, Lucy Everhart's marine-biologist mother was sure to follow. In fact, she was on a boat far off the coast of Massachusetts, collecting shark data when she died suddenly. Lucy was seven. Since then Lucy and her father have kept their heads above water—thanks in large part to a few close friends and neighbors. But June of her twelfth summer brings more than the end of school and a heat wave to sleepy Rockport. On one steamy day, the tide brings a great white—and then another tragedy, cutting short a friendship everyone insists was "meaningful" but no one can tell Lucy what it all meant. To survive the fresh wave of grief, Lucy must grab the line that connects her depressed father, a stubborn fisherman, and a curious old widower to her mother's unfinished research on the Great White's return to Cape Cod. If Lucy can find a way to help this unlikely quartet follow the sharks her mother loved, she'll finally be able to look beyond what she's lost and toward what's left to be discovered.
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The Lottery Plus One
Emma Donoghue
Once upon a time, two couples with Jamaican, Mohawk, Indian, and Scottish ethnic roots won the lottery and bought a big house where all of them, four adults and seven adopted and biological children, could live together in harmony--but change is inevitable, especially when a disagreeable grandfather comes to stay.
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The Lotterys Plus One
Emma Donoghue
Once upon a time, two couples with Jamaican, Mohawk, Indian, and Scottish ethnic roots won the lottery and bought a big house where all of them, four adults and seven adopted and biological children, could live together in harmony--but change is inevitable, especially when a disagreeable grandfather comes to stay.