– Newbie Submissions
“Creating a community of avid readers, one video at a time©“
Newbie Entries
These are some videos and links to others that have been submitted by our newest, first-time subscribers:
Click here to find out how to post your newbie entries to this site.
| Title | Author | Description | School | State |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dog's Life, A | Ann M. Martin | Squirrel, a stray puppy, tells her life story, from her nurturing mother and brother to making her own way in the world, facing busy highways, changing seasons and humans both gentle and brutal. | Diplomat Elementary School | Florida |
| Double Dog Dare | Lisa Graff | What would you do to win a dare war? In this novel, fourth-graders Kansas Bloom and Francine Halata start out as archenemies, until--in a battle of wits and willpower--they discover that they have a lot more in common than either would have guessed. A story for boys and girls alike -- and for anyone who has ever wanted anything so badly that they'd lick a lizard to get it! | Diplomat Elementary School | Florida |
| Familiars #4, The | Adam Jay Epstein | Peace has returned to the queendom of Vastia. Paksahara has been defeated, and the three familiars Aldwyn, Skyler, and Gilbert are the heroes to thank. But when a birthday celebration at the palace goes dreadfully wrong, and Queen Loranella falls victim to a curse, it seems the familiars are the prime suspects. After narrowly escaping the palace dungeons, they'll have to embark on a quest to clear their names—a quest that will lead them across Vastia and even into the magical land of dreams. | Diplomat Elementary School | Florida |
| Holes | Louis Sachar | Stanley Yelnats is a kid under a curse. A curse that began with his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather and has since followed generations of Yelnats. Now Stanley has been unjustly sent to a boys' detention center, Camp Green Lake, where the warden makes the boys "build character" by spending all day, every day, digging holes five feet wide and five feet deep. It doesn't take long for Stanley to realize there's more than character improvement going on at Camp Green Lake: the warden is looking for something. Stanley tries to dig up the truth in this inventive and darkly humorous tale of crime and punishment—and redemption. | Diplomat Elementary School | Florida |
| Touching Spirit Bear | Ben Mikaelsen | After severely injuring Peter Driscal in an empty parking lot, troublemaker Cole Matthews is in major trouble. But instead of jail time, Cole is given an alternative: a one-year banishment to a remote Alaskan island. This program—called Circle Justice—is based on Native American traditions that provide healing for the criminal mind. To avoid serious jail time, Cole resolves to go. While there, Cole is mauled by a mysterious white bear and left for dead. Thoughts of his abusive parents, helpless Peter, and his violent anger cause him to examine the root of his troubled ways. | Lugoff-Elgin Middle School | South Carolina |
| Liberation of Gabriel King | K.L. Going | Gabriel King was a born chicken. He’s afraid of spiders, corpses, loose cows, and just about everything related to the fifth grade. Gabe’s best friend, Frita Wilson, thinks Gabe needs some liberating from his fears. Frita knows something about being brave— she’s the only black kid in school in a town with an active Ku Klux Klan. Together Gabe and Frita are going to spend the summer of 1976 facing down the fears on Gabe’s list. But it turns out that Frita has her own list, and while she’s helping Gabe confront his fears, she’s avoiding the thing that scares her the most. | Presbyterian Day School | Tennessee |
| Jackie and Me | Dan Gutman | Like every other kid in his class, Joe Stoshack has to write a report on an African American who's made an important contribution to society. Unlike every other kid in his class, Joe has a special talent: with the help of old baseball cards, he can travel through time. So for his report, Joe decides to go back to meet one of the greatest baseball players ever, Jackie Robinson, to find out what it was like to be the man who broke baseball's color barrier. Joe plans on writing a prize-winning report. But he doesn't plan on a trip that will for a short time change the color of his skin--and forever change his view of history and his definition of courage. | Presbyterian Day School | Tennessee |
| Long Way from Chicago, A | Richard Peck | Although the narrator, Joey, and his younger sister, Mary Alice, live in the Windy city during the reign of Al Capone and Bugs Moran, most of their adventures occur "a long way from Chicago," during their annual down-state visits with Grandma Dowdel. A woman as "old as the hills," "tough as an old boot," and larger than life ("We could hardly see her town because of Grandma. She was so big, and the town was so small"), Grandma continually astounds her citified grandchildren by stretching the boundaries of truth. | Presbyterian Day School | Tennessee |
| Book Thief, The | Markus Zusak | It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement. | Keene High School | New Hampshire |
| Giving Tree, The | Shel Silverstein | 'Once there was a tree...and she loved a little boy.' Every day the boy would come to the tree to eat her apples, swing from her branches, or slide down her trunk...and the tree was happy. But as the boy grew older he began to want more from the tree, and the tree gave and gave and gave. | Keene High School | New Hampshire |
| 1984 | George Orwell | The year 1984 is upon us, and George Orwell's prophetic, nightmare vision in 1949 of the world we were becoming is timelier than ever. | Keene High School | New Hampshire |
| Locke and Key | Joe Hill | Locke & Key tells of Keyhouse, an unlikely New England mansion, with fantastic doors that transform all who dare to walk through them, and home to a hate-filled and relentless creature that will not rest until it forces open the most terrible door of them all! | Keene High School | New Hampshire |
| Hunger Games, The | Suzanne Collins | In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. Long ago the districts waged war on the Capitol and were defeated. As part of the surrender terms, each district agreed to send one boy and one girl to appear in an annual televised event called, "The Hunger Games," a fight to the death on live TV. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives alone with her mother and younger sister, regards it as a death sentence when she is forced to represent her district in the Games. The terrain, rules, and level of audience participation may change but one thing is constant: kill or be killed. | Keene High School | New Hampshire |
| Red Sky at Morning | Richard Bradford | The classic coming-of-age story set during World War II about the enduring spirit of youth and the values in life that count. | Keene High School | New Hampshire |
| Omnivores Dilemna, The | Michael Pollan | Today, buffeted by one food fad after another, America is suffering from what can only be described as a national eating disorder. Will it be fast food tonight, or something organic? Or perhaps something we grew ourselves? The question of what to have for dinner has confronted us since man discovered fire. But how we answer it now, as the dawn of the twenty-first century, may determine our survival as a species. | Keene High School | New Hampshire |