family
— A twelve-year-old faces peer pressure when her best friend Lauren shoplifts and tries to involve her, leading to difficult choices about friendship and integrity.
— During a military coup in Sierra Leone, a fifth-grader shelters with his embassy family, finding and symbolically discarding a bullet that represents the violence surrounding them.
— A five-year-old girl sits by a lake at sunset, contemplating why everything in life requires waiting, until her father helps her understand its purpose.
— A young artist who draws the sunrise every morning struggles with her mother's acting ambitions for her, then finds hope after losing an art contest when her grandmother offers to...
— Eight-year-old Soon-Soon Wang flees Cultural Revolution China for America after her parents are taken by the government, leaving behind her best friend Xiao-Long.
— After surviving a plane crash, a boy struggles with trauma while his friend's family hobby store faces closure, both learning to face uncertain futures.
— A puzzle-loving girl falls asleep on an unfinished jigsaw and wakes up inside it as a colonial farm girl, discovering she must complete the puzzle from within to escape.
— A six-year-old girl hatches a duckling from an abandoned egg, raises it as her best friend, then learns to let it return to its wild family at the pond.
— A seven-year-old girl reluctantly tries water-skiing again on the Mississippi River and finally succeeds, discovering the joy she'd been missing.
— A girl who loves ocean life runs away from home during a hurricane, is rescued by dolphins, and learns to appreciate what she has.