21st Century Kids: Navigating Friendships for Tweens

This guide covers the many dynamics of friendship. Each section offers a short fictional story about a specific aspect of friendship encountered. Readers learn to respond to each scenario by identifying and exploring each friendship issue.

Everything you ever wanted to know about the topic of friendship, but were afraid to ask. Information and advice is provided by experts, but also by tweens themselves and mentor teens (older teens). 

This book guides kids how to break the ice when meeting new potential friends and offers real-life scenarios that help kids practice friendship skills.

An interesting look at real friendships between J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Also the late Kobe Bryant and Lionel Messi and others.

In this humorous collection of 23 poems, poet Douglas Florian explores both the ups and downs of friendship.

Offers guidance how to handle being bullied by a friend or group of friends. 

Olive, a fifth grader, is left out of performing in her school variety show. Yet, all of her friends have already formed their performing groups. Find out how Olive resolves her feelings of exclusion.

It's never easy being the new kid in school, but when 12-year-old Jordan Banks transfers to a mostly white prep school instead of the art school he wanted to attend, he encounters a whole host of problems he never experienced in his neighborhood of Washington Heights. New Kid won the John Newberry Medal for children's literature and a Coretta Scott King Award, too, but it has appeal to all ages. Jordan is an engaging, observant, and artistic protagonist. The series is punctuated with gentle humor from his drawings and cartoons. Teens and grown-ups, if you were ever "the only" or one of a few Black kids in your school, I promise, you will feel seen and heard. Jordan Banks is all of us.

What happens when your best friend joins a group of popular girls? This is the situation Shannon finds herself in when her friend Adrianne befriends the most popular girl in their class.

Can two people that are so different get along with each other? Christine and Moon are next-door neighbors who become the best of friends. Not only do they share their interests with each other, but their deepest secrets as well.