Top Grade: K-8 selections, Fall 2014

Part of the "5 Animals" series!

Elephants are truly remarkable, unmistakable animals. Their huge size, giant ears, amazing trunk and incredible intelligence make them unique in the natural world. They are highly active, complex, wideranging animals who play a key role in the ecosystems they inhabit.

5 Elephants will provide you with some fascinating elephant facts and figures, as well as introduce you to some of the serious challenges that wild and captive elephants face. To truly understand ele …

"While descending the Kuakuapishish River I am transformed into a butterfly With my new wings, like a wolf I cry When night falls" — Cynthia

Illustrator Rog� visited a school in Mingan, an Innu village in northeastern Quebec. He spent a few days taking the time to photograph each child. Once he returned home to his studio, brush in hand, he revisited the eyes of these children and drew their portraits.

Mingan, my Village is a collection of fifteen faces, and fifteen poems written by young …

A girl who founded a charity for girls’ education, a boy who raised money with every baseball he could hit. True stories of children who opened up their hearts and minds to the unfairness of the world and decided to try and make a difference, because everyone deserves to be happy.

Andrew Adansi-Bonnah from Ghana raised thousands of dollars for refugee children in Somalia after seeing their terrible situation on the news. Jonathan Lee from South Korea was given special permission to travel to No …

2016 Young Author's Award — Shortlisted
CCBC's Best Books for Kids & Teens (Fall 2015) - Commended

Instead of writing in a diary, twelve-year-old Jo Waller secretly edits Wikipedia entries to cope with the worst year of her life.

Jo Waller has three brainy friends, two mostly harmless parents, and one deep, dark secret: she edits Wikipedia for fun. But when her twenty-four-year-old brother moves back home with his pregnant girlfriend, Jo is forced to reconcile the idealized version of her absent …

Kate's family has told her that on her thirteenth birthday she'll hear the "Whooooo" call of the moon, and howl back, and become a werewolf just like them. But she doesn't want to be a werewolf. She's always felt more like a duck. On the night of her thirteenth birthday, Kate stands near her family's cabin in the backwoods of New Brunswick and hears the moon calling—but it sounds like more of a "Whooooo?" as in "Who are you?" and Kate does what she's always wanted to do—she quacks. Quack, qu …

Instead of fishing for "channel cats" with his great-grandfather in southern Manitoba, thirteen-year-old Finn Armstrong winds up fighting the Red River Flood of 1997, the biggest flood since 1826. Finn is furious when his parents head off on another scientific mission to the other side of the world, and he has to stay with his grandmother on her farm in southern Manitoba. Not only are the kids at school far less than welcoming, he also has to deal with his cantankerous great-grandfather who does …

In her fourth historical novel dealing with British North America and the American Revolution, Jean Rae Baxter focuses on Broken Trail, a young boy who was born white but captured and adopted by the Oneida people. The great Mohawk leader Thayendanegea - known to Euro-Canadians as Joseph Brant - has chosen Broken Trail to assist him in the daunting task of uniting all the tribes and nations with the goal of establishing a country of their own. In preparation, Broken Trail must attend a Christian …

Can three comic-book superheroes, and a rock that falls from the sky, really protect Robert Tourond's brothers as they fight the enemy in Europe during World War II? It's 1943 and World War II is raging. 13-year-old Robert Tourond is safe at home in Calgary, but his three brothers are all overseas, fighting the Nazis. A dreamer, Robert closely follows the exploits of his three favourite comic book heroes - Captain Ice, Sedna of the Sea and the Maple Leaf Kid - who also battle thebad guys in the …