Kylie Jean decides to sign up for gymnastics lessons. After much practice, she performs in the big showcase event. But she learns that making a new friend is even better than becoming a tumbling queen.
The Summer Olympics inspires Kylie Jean Carter to take gymnastics lessons, but even better than that is making a new friend, Abby, who is deaf, and starting to learn sign language.
A sports reporter investigates the training of girls as professional gymnasts and figure skaters, arguing that the pressure to succeed and to look beautiful results in mental and physical harm, from eating disorders to psychological trauma.
Who will be brave enough to make friends with the boy named Queen? Sara Cassidy’s acclaimed novel, A Boy Named Queen, is now available in paperback! Evelyn is both aghast and fascinated when a new boy comes to grade five and tells everyone his name is Queen. Queen wears shiny gym shorts and wants to organize a chess/environment club. His father plays weird loud music and has tattoos. How will the class react? How will Evelyn? Evelyn is an only child with a strict routine and an even stricter mother. And yet in her quiet way she notices things. She notices the way bullies don’t seem to faze Queen. The way he seems to live by his own rules. When it turns out that they take the same route home from school, Evelyn and Queen become friends, even if she finds Queen irritating at times. Why doesn’t he just shut up and stop attracting so much attention to himself. Yet Queen is the most interesting person she has ever met. So when she receives a last-minute invitation to his birthday party, she knows she must somehow persuade her mother to let her go, even if Queen’s world upends everything her mother considers appropriate. Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.4.3 Describe in depth a character, setting, or event in a story or drama, drawing on specific details in the text (e.g., a character's thoughts, words, or actions).
Inspired by her report on a female pirate, and challenged by a boy in her class, Kylie Jean and her friends decide to form a pirate gang, complete with costumes, a secret hideout, and buried treasure--but when the treasure disappears Kylie makes an important discovery about the local haunted house.
Second grader Kylie Jean joins her school art club, and learns to paint in the style of several different artists, but for the Mural Art Contest she decides to paint a watercolor picture of a local Texas barn and duck pond--until a squabble between her dog and the ducks turns it into an example of abstract art instead.