The noisy fifth grade boys of Laketon Elementary School challenge the equally loud fifth grade girls to a "no talking" contest.

Ted Hammond, the only sixth grader in his small Nebraska town's one-room schoolhouse, searches for clues to the disappearance of a homeless family. Ted Hammond learns that in a very small town, there's no such thing as an isolated event. And the solution of one mystery is often the beginning of another.

After unscrupulous collector S. Wendell Palamino cons him out of a valuable baseball card, sixth-grader Griffin Bing puts together a band of misfits to break into Palomino's heavily guarded store and steal the card back, planning to use the money to finance his father's failing invention, the Smart Pick fruit picker.

When the Hornets lose their quarterback for the season and the replacement lacks the talent to take charge, the coach picks a solid receiver as emergency quarterback.

Washed ashore as a baby in tiny Tupelo Landing, North Carolina, Mo LoBeau, now age eleven, and her best friend Dale turn detective when the amnesiac Colonel, owner of a caf�e and co-parent of Mo with his cook, Miss Lana, seems implicated in a murder.

Nick endures servitude, beatings, and more after his British father's plantation in Burma is invaded by the Japanese in 1941, and when his father and others are taken prisoner and Nick is stranded with his friend Mya, they plan a daring escape on elephants, risking their lives to save Nick's father and Mya's brother from a Japanese prisoner of war camp.

Mercy the pig's love of buttered toast leads to the capture of a small thief who would rather be a cowboy.

After years of playing nothing but soccer in Hudson City, New Jersey, Manny has to work very hard to play on the middle school football team, using determination, speed, and smarts to make up for being small and inexperienced.

When Olivia learns that there will be no band at the evening's fireworks display, she decides to form one of her own, with herself as the only musician and some rather unusual instruments.

In central Texas in 1899, eleven-year-old Callie Vee Tate is instructed to be a lady by her mother, learns about love from the older three of her six brothers, and studies the natural world with her grandfather, the latter of which leads to an important discovery.