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Claudia Mills is the author of many chapter and middle-grade books, including 7 x 9=Trouble!; How Oliver Olson Changed the World; Kelsey Green, Reading Queen; and, most recently, Zero Tolerance. Mills shares a wonderful list of her family's favorite books that feature girl protagonists—she encourages you to share them with both boys and girls, alike.

How do we teach compassion?

By Luisa LaFleur, The Children’s Book Review
Published: February , 2012

Kids can be mean. Sometimes our kids are on the receiving end of the taunts and name-calling and that’s hard to deal with. But other times our kids are on the giving end and that’s even harder to deal with. Teaching children to be compassionate—to understand someone else’s suffering and to try and alleviate that suffering—is not easy. A key first step is to get children to understand that mean actions—teasing, name-calling and the like—can be hurtful. Here are a few books that can help impart the message that being kind to one another is essential and that the golden rule is paramount.

The Hundred Dresses

By Eleanor Estes; Illustrated by Helena Estes and Louis Slobodkin

Reading level: Ages 5 and up

Paperback: 80 pages

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing

What to expect: Lessons about friendship; allusions to poverty and immigration; harships

In The Hundred Dresses, which takes place around the time of World War I, Wanda wears the same faded blue dress to school every day. One day, in the midst of playful banter, Wanda tells her classmates that she has one hundred beautiful dresses at home, all lined up and that she wears the dresses on special occasions. The other girls don’t believe her and begin to tease her about it daily. One girl, Maddie, feels bad about the teasing but doesn’t speak up for fear the teasing will turn to her. But as time passes, she comes to see the error of her ways and learns how important it is to stand up for your friends.

This is an intricate story that offers many opportunities for discussion. Wanda is poor. She’s an immigrant from another country at a time when there were no social networks to provide support. She speaks with an accent that automatically sets her apart from the other girls. But in essence, she’s just a little girl who wants to fit in and have friends.

Add this book to your collection: The Hundred Dresses

Watch Your Tongue, Cecily Beasley

By Lane Fredrickson; Illustrated by Jon Davis

Reading level: Ages 5 and up

Hardcover: 22 pages

Publisher: Sterling Children’s Books

What to expect: Rude behavior and its aftermath

Cecily is a ghastly child. She’s rude, impertinent, ungrateful and can be downright mean. She doesn’t say please or thank you, she doesn’t share, and she sticks her tongue out at her classmates and teachers. But one day, her tongue gets stuck and she can’t put it back in her mouth. She has a hard lesson to learn about kindness and it takes some time but eventually Cecily realizes that she’s not been very nice to anybody.

This simple story has a strong message—sometimes we don’t realize how hurtful we c

When you work with the real Winnie-the-Pooh you have a tendency to get complacent. “Oh sure,” you think.  ” I know everything about that bear.  Absolutely everything.”  So it’s nice when the universe gives you a swift kick in the pants to remind you that you are not always up on your Pooh knowledge.  Or at least not as up on it as you might think.  For example, I completely missed the fact that they just reissued The Winnie-the-Pooh Cookbook by Virginia H. Ellison (amusingly my library’s gift shop has known for quite some time has stocked several copies accordingly).  I found this out when a reporter from the Associated Press wanted to interview me (or anyone else who worked with the silly old bear) about Pooh and food.  The final piece, Counting pots of honey? Pooh’s recipes for them consists of me desperately trying to think of ways to describe Pooh and food.  You will probably enjoy it more for the cute honey gingerbread cookie recipe at the end.

• The article in Tablet Magazine (“A New Read on Jewish Life”) is entitled The Others: Several new books for children and young adults ask us to see the world through Palestinian kids’ eyes.  Its author is Marjorie Ingall, one of my favorite children’s book reviewers, most recently seen heaping praise upon A Tale Dark & Grimm in the last New York Times children’s book supplement, as is right.  The article in Tablet gives great insight into books like Where the Streets Had a Name (which I reviewed myself) as well as Sarah Glidden’s How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, which I have on order with my library.  For this article, Marjorie is lambasted in her comment section.  Some of the comments are thoughtful, but a great many show why this issue is so rarely discussed in children’s literature today.

• I suppose it’s old news, but more Best Book lists of 2010 are up and running!  First you have the Kirkus list, which contain more than a couple non-fiction titles that I would like to get my hands on.  It also features my beloved Departure Time, a fact that makes me inordinately happy.  Another list that came out last week was the School Library Journal picks.  Split into different parts, you can read the somewhat truncated non-fiction list here, the picture book list here ( 10 Comments on Fusenews: A small smackerel of news, last added: 11/23/2010