Our top 3 middle-grade series

We get asked a lot for book recommendations for kids, so here are our top 3 middle-grade series! These stories are great for both boys and girls. They teach valuable lessons about friendship, self-belief, and looking after others.

• Polly and Buster by Sally Rippin
• Ivy and Bean by Annie Barrows
• Grover McBane by Claire Garth

Hope your family enjoys these stories as much as our family!

Transcript

I get a lot of questions about book recommendations for kids. So I want to share with you three of my all time favourite middle grade series. Now these recommendations are for boys as well as girls. So some of them have female protagonists, but that is no reason to deprive a boy from the magic and wonder and lessons of these stories. Girls read stories about boy heroes all the time. When we don't expose our boys stories about girls, we are limiting their imaginations and their empathy, and we are implicitly teaching them that girls and women are not as interesting or as important as them. And let me tell you it is pretty hard to have meaningful connections with half the population if you grow up believing that they aren't as important as you are. So here are my recommendations. The first one is the Polly and Buster series, by Sally Rippin. So these are beautiful stories about what friendship is and what it isn't, And the lesson is that real friendship is not about popularity or what other people think and who you should hang around. It's about trust and loyalty and choosing friends who like you just the way you are. Number two is the Ivy and Bean series, by Annie Barrows. These are my all time favourite books because it's about two kids who are totally secure in who they are. It doesn't even occur to them to care about what other people think about them. These two girls are girls who like themselves. One hundred percent. And the last one is the Grover McBane series by Claire Garth. So there's five in this series, and these are stories based on a real life rescue dog, and it's about looking after others. That when you help someone, a person or an animal, it's good for them, but it's also really good for you. Okay. I hope you and your children enjoyed these books as much as our family did.