Social Science Kids

When the 13th Classroom is struck by purple lightning, something strange happens - all of the students get superpowers! You might think this was superb, but it was not. (It was sorta silly.) With great gifts comes wild weather, giant roaches, atomic farts, and other tricky troubles. As the students of Classroom 13 are about to learn, getting superpowers is not always super.

This book spotlights female scientist Temple Grandin, whose experience being on the autism spectrum has informed her advocacy and her work as an animal behaviorist. Temple Grandin's pride in being different and how it shaped her world is celebrated in this biography.

Do you feel prepared to initiate and facilitate meaningful, productive dialogues about race in your classroom? Are you looking for practical strategies to engage with your students? Inspired by Frederick Douglass' abolitionist call to action, "it is not light that is needed, but fire", Matthew Kay has spent his career learning how to lead students through the most difficult race conversations. Kay not only makes the case that high school classrooms are one of the best places to have those conversations, but he also offers a method for getting them right.

Leo Fender is no stranger to catastrophe, whether it’s the intergalactic war that took his mother’s life or the ongoing fight for his own. He’s seen his planet plundered, his ship attacked, his father kidnapped, and his brother go missing—and found himself stranded on a ship with a bunch of mercenary space pirates. Still, nothing could have prepared him for the moment he and the crew tried to save his father...and discovered a dark plot that could destroy hundreds of worlds in the blink of an eye.

Our children's first digital footprints are made before they can walk-even before they are born - as parents use fertility apps to aid conception, post ultrasound images, and share their baby's hospital mug shot. Then, in rapid succession come terabytes of baby pictures stored in the cloud, digital baby monitors with built-in artificial intelligence, and real-time updates from daycare. Unwittingly, parents, teachers, and other trusted adults are compiling digital dossiers for children that could be available to everyone - friends, employers, law enforcement - forever.

After their scary adventure, Bex and Charlie have sworn never to play Monsters Unleashed again. Then Veratrum Games Corp releases a new augmented reality game featuring aliens instead of monsters, and the best friends just can't resist. After all, everyone loves it, even their science teacher, because it includes real star charts. But when they go to an observatory on a class trip, and open the game near a radio telescope, they get more than they bargained for: real aliens.

In 1937, a schoolteacher on the island of Maui challenged a group of poverty-stricken sugar plantation kids to swim upstream against the current of their circumstance. The goal? To become Olympians. They faced seemingly insurmountable obstacles. The children were Japanese-American, were malnourished and barefoot, and had no pool; they trained in the filthy irrigation ditches that snaked down from the mountains into the sugarcane fields.

After James gets a pen-and-ink set for his birthday, Marvin the beetle surprises him by creating an elaborate miniature drawing. James gets all the credit for the picture and before these unlikely friends know it they are caught up in a staged art heist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that could help recover a famous drawing by Albrecht Dürer. But James can't go through with the plan without Marvin's help. And that's where things get really complicated (and interesting!)

Nicola Berry and her friends have barely caught their breath from their last trip to space when they are called on another intergalactic adventure! This time, they're on their way to Shobble, a beautiful snowy rainbow planet where nothing bad ever happens - or so they say. It turns out there is trouble brewing beneath this glittery exterior, and Nicola is put in a tough position. Should she risk defying the planet's dangerous commander-in-chief to help the people of Shobble?

It’s time to change the conversation—about work, life, and “balance.” Work and life are inextricably, intimately intertwined. We need to celebrate what we do give our children—even and especially in moments of imbalance—rather than apologizing for what we don’t. In this way, we can model for our children how we use our talents to help others and raise awareness about the issues closest to our hearts.

Heather Shumaker has sparked much discussion with her "renegade rules for raising competent and compassionate kids". In this follow-up book, she takes on new hot-button issues like banning homework, technology use, and skipping kindergarten. Shumaker offers broader guidance on how parents can control their own anger and move from an overscheduled life to one of more free play.

If you ask Delphinia Baker, she’d tell you she has all the family she needs. Sure, her mom passed away when she was young, her dad is often away on deployment, but even though Del has never had anyone she can call her people, she has always had her grandmother—and that’s enough. Besides, having no roots just makes it that much easier when you have to move again. All of that changes, though, when Gramma falls ill and Del is sent to stay with her great-grandmother. Del has never even heard of Nana Rose, and she has no interest in spending the summer on a hot island off the South Carolina coast.

Over the past decade, educational instruction has become increasingly digitized as districts rush to dole out laptops and iPads to every student. Yet the most important question, “Is this what is best for students?” is glossed over. Veteran teachers Joe Clement and Matt Miles have seen firsthand how damaging technology overuse and misuse has been to our kids. On a mission to educate and empower parents, they show how screen saturation at home and school has created a wide range of cognitive and social deficits in our young people.

Let your children learn with Diggory Doo, the dragon, about gratitude, appreciation, and thankfulness. Fun, cute, and entertaining with relatable stories, this is a must-have book for parents, teachers, school counselors, and educators to help kids understand the importance of picking up after themselves.

The mother of a bullied first grader, popular blogger Carrie Goldman's inspiring true story triggered an outpouring of support from online communities around the world. In Bullied, she gives us a guide to the crucial lessons and actionable guidance she's learned about how to stop bullying before it starts. It is a book born from Goldman's post about the ridicule her daughter suffered from bringing a Star Wars thermos to school.

It's a life-changing trip. Take it! John Ahern had a high-flying job, big house, loving wife and two great kids. But if this was success, why did he sense he was failing as a husband and father? So John did something insane. He quit the corporate world and bought a busted-up camper-van online to chase an improbable dream: a year travelling together as a family...on the road with kids.

If you love to learn about dinosaurs, you might want to consider becoming a paleontologist. A paleontologist studies the remains of prehistoric life. They study why fossils form and why the animals and plants lived where they did.

Screenwise offers a realistic and optimistic perspective on how to thoughtfully guide kids in the digital age. Many parents feel that their kids are addicted, detached, or distracted because of their digital devices. Using the foundation of their own values and experiences, parents and educators can learn about the digital world to help set kids up for success in a world fueled by technology.

All children and teens stress out at times, but if they also have ADHD, their anxiety can skyrocket. Anxiety Relief Tools for Kids and Teens with ADHD: A Practical Guide for Parents has smart strategies that equip parents to equip their children to deal with anxiety. In this book, parents gain insight into how ADHD affects their children and why it causes so much anxiety. This guide is filled with exercises and activities that teach children and teens how to recognize their own ADHD symptoms, counteract them, and start reducing the anxiety caused by ADHD.

Parents everywhere want their children to be happy and do well. Yet how parents seek to achieve this ambition varies enormously. Through personal anecdotes and original research, Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti reveal that in countries with increasing economic inequality, such as the United States, parents push harder to ensure their children have a path to security and success.