Short Stories for Middle Grades
Created by Abby49 on January 24, 2021
Some of the Kinder Planets
Meet someone new… Harriet, who sees Mars and tastes pomengranates -- all in one day; Cluny, a girl who wants to publish a magazine for people with weird names; Ky, who lives in a geodesic dome deep in the country; Fletcher, the survivor of an almost fatal illness, who decides to paste the names of exotic places he would like to visit on his chest and stomach; Edward George, who made a discovery and became famous -- famous and forgotten -- on a hot day in 1867.
You'll get to know them all in Som …
The Gift Is in the Making
The Gift Is in the Making retells previously published Anishinaabeg stories, bringing to life Anishinaabeg values and teachings to a new generation. Readers are immersed in a world where all genders are respected, the tiniest being has influence in the world, and unconditional love binds families and communities to each other and to their homeland. Sprinkled with gentle humour and the Anishinaabe language, this collection of stories speaks to children and adults alike, and reminds us of the time …
The Smart Princess
The Smart Princess takes readers inside the fantasies, dreams and disappointments of young people who are Deaf. This book is written and illustrated by winners of a national competition, the Ladder Awards.
The Whirlpool
From Boston Globe–Horn Book Award winner Laurel Croza comes a mesmerizing collection of short stories about the whirlpool of adolescence.
Charity takes small steps to escape her controlling father. Jasmine endures the rumors about her at school, even though no one really knows what happened last summer. The Oh! So Perfect Hair Dolly wishes for just the right child to take her home from the store. Nicola has a run-in with a classmate on her first day at a new school in the big city — or is the …
There’s no need for Snapchat or text messages in a high school cafeteria at lunchtime. All you have to do is sit at one of the tables. Guaranteed, after a minute or two, you’ll know everything there is to know. It’s all here. Carried just above our heads. Words surging and swelling and rolling across the cafeteria like bodysurfers at a concert. Talk washing over us, flooding us with the ohmygods, the names, the details. Everyone, even the quiet ones, caught up in the rumors. The gossip. The whirlpool.
Sometimes the whirlpool slows. A sudden waiting, watching, listening silence. A signal that fresh drama is about to unfold. Not on the stage at the back of the room, the curtain drawn shut. This theater plays out right in front of us, down on the floor, in the depths of the cafeteria.
I’m not surprised when the current pauses in front of me. It’s the end of September but it’s still my name that swirls around and around and around. My name trapped in the whirlpool since school started, the day after Labor Day.
Dark Times
The result of a cross-Canada contest for the best short stories about young people’s experience of loss and grief, Dark Times is a superb anthology about a topic that often remains hidden but is crucial in the development of a child’s sense of identity.
Secrets: Stories Selected by Marthe Jocelyn
In all their permutations, these unforgettable stories explore one of the irresistible facets of human nature, the fact that everyone has a secret. Marthe Jocelyn has selected twelve stories
by several of the best authors in North America to explore the nature and the power of secrets. Sometimes secrets can be downright funny – how would you like to be the front person for your fake, clairvoyant mother? Secrets can also be scary – if you are pretending that your father is dead so you don’ …
Sit
Nine poignant and empowering short stories from the author of The Breadwinner.
The seated child. With a single powerful image, Deborah Ellis draws our attention to nine children and the situations they find themselves in, often through no fault of their own. In each story, a child makes a decision and takes action, be that a tiny gesture or a life-altering choice.
Jafar is a child laborer in a chair factory and longs to go to school. Sue sits on a swing as she and her brother wait to have a superv …
“We would make perfect murderers,” said Sanu, who was one year older than Jafar…
“What are you talking about?” Jafar asked.
Sanu held up his hands and wiggled his fingers.
“No fingerprints!” he said, laughing.
They could laugh now, but when Jafar first started sanding, his fingers got so sore and bloody!
“Get one more drop of blood on one of my chairs, you little cockroach, and I’ll send you back to your family in a garbage sack!” Boss had yelled at him.
*
Oak Street was not the busiest street in town, but lots of people still walked down it, and they all looked at Bea, sitting by herself on a bench in the middle of a school day.
Bea didn’t worry about the old ladies. She had sat on this bench before on her days off and the old ladies left her alone…
The dangerous ones were the yoga ladies…
The yoga ladies were busybodies.
*
Mike hears the outer door of the Administrative Segregation pod shut and lock. He is all alone…
His eyes are wiped and his face is dry by the time he hears the Ag Seg door unlock again and the peep-hole covering in his own door slide open.
“You all right in there, 75293?”
Mike knows the voice of CO Jenson.
It is the voice of the devil.
War at the Snow White Motel and Other Stories
An insightful and funny new collection of short stories from award-winning author Tim Wynne-Jones.
In “War at the Snow White Motel,” Rex and his family are vacationing in Vermont. A thoughtless act launches him into war with an older teenager at their motel, but a much bigger conflict — the Vietnam War — looms large on the horizon.
Ant wants to join the #FridaysForFuture movement — and impressing the new girl at school is only one good reason why. Joseph and Danny are determined to right …
The swimming pool is shaped like a heart. No, wait — it’s an apple. Of course! The poisonous apple Snow White took a bite of that sent her into a coma. Sort of weird, really, when you think about it. Who’d want to swim in a poisonous pool? No one by the look of it. The pool is empty. All that delicious coolness just lying there, sparkling in the late afternoon sun.…
Poison or not, alligators or not, I’m hot and I want into that pool. I head straight for the diving board, take as big a bounce as I can off the end and cannonball into the water.
Splash!
I drift down into the blue coolness, my eyes wide open. Glug, glug, glug. There is only watery sunlight down here, as if the sun was a big yellow china ball that someone smashed into little shards and sprinkled on the blue tile floor. My goggles aren’t on tight enough and water seeps inside, so with a little kick off the bottom I drift to the surface.
“Hey, you!”
A voice booms above me. I grab the lip of the pool. I also grab a mouthful of water, which makes me cough and cough. There is a large pair of hairy feet planted right beside my hand. I look up, my vision all swimmy through goggles full of water — way up, past a pair of Superman legs, a pair of yellow bathing trunks with palm trees on them, a chest big enough to pitch a tent on, to a face glaring down at me as if I am a toad and the only thing stopping him from squashing me is that he doesn’t have his toad-squashing boots on. Then I see the comic book in his hand. It’s sopping wet.
