6 award-winning books to gift for 8th grade promotion
Middle school promotion deserves more than a card. These six are Newbery Medal and National Book Award winners — the kind of books that meet an 11-to-14-year-old exactly at the 'figuring out who I am' stage, right before high school starts.
Best for grades 5–8 · the graduate moving on to high school.
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by Kwame Alexander · Grades 5th–8th · 240 pages · 2014
Winner of the 2015 Newbery Medal and a Coretta Scott King Honor — Kwame Alexander's verse novel about twin brothers, basketball, and growing apart.
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by Jacqueline Woodson · Grades 5th–8th · 352 pages · 2014
A National Book Award winner and Newbery Honor — Jacqueline Woodson's memoir in verse about growing up Black in the 1960s and 70s South and North.
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by Sharon Creech · Grades 5th–7th · 280 pages · 1994
Winner of the 1995 Newbery Medal — Sharon Creech's road-trip novel about a girl retracing her mother's journey while telling a friend's story.
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by Meg Medina · Grades 4th–7th · 368 pages · 2018
Winner of the Newbery Medal — Meg Medina's novel about a scholarship student juggling family, class, and a beloved grandfather's decline.
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by Erin Entrada Kelly · Grades 3th–7th · 320 pages · 2017
Winner of the 2018 Newbery Medal — Erin Entrada Kelly's four-narrator novel about a shy Filipino-American boy and the friends who search for him.
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by Ellen Raskin · Grades 5th–7th · 224 pages · 1978
Winner of the 1979 Newbery Medal — sixteen heirs, one mystery, one inheritance. The mystery novel that taught a generation to read for clues.
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