1621: A New Look at Thanksgiving (2004) by Catherine O’Neal Grace. 

If you want to bring actual historical fact about Thanksgiving to your family celebration this year, this is the book to read. Created in association with Plimoth Plantation and with National Geographic photographers capturing various reenactment scenes there, adults may be more surprised than kids about what happened at Plymouth Rock all those years ago. Especially important are the voices and experiences of the Wampanoag people, included just as equally as the pilgrims. 

Why not get beyond the popular myth and have a little historical truth with your pumpkin pie this year? 

Yum! MmMm! Que Rico! (2007) by Pat Mora, illustrations by Rafael Lopez. 

I love this combination of haiku and little non-fiction tidbits about food native to the Americas. Come on, you gotta love this little sample:

Potato

Underground magic.
Peel brown bundle, mash, pile high.
Salt and pepper clouds.

Potatoes are native to the Andean mountains of Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador in South America. The Aymara Indians of Bolivia developed more than two hundred varieties of potatoes, and the Indians of Peru have more than two hundred names for their varieties…In 1995 potatoes became the first vegetable grown in outer space.  

How it Feels to be Adopted (1988) by Jill Krementz. 

There are too many stories about adopted kids that play on old cliches. There’s Harry Potter, Despicable Me, Annie, Stuart Little, Hotel for Dogs, even Tarzan. 

Thankfully there’s an antidote to all that, How it Feels to be Adopted by Jill Krementz. This is a book of oral histories of kids who are adopted, how they experience adoption and most importantly how they feel about it. 19 boys and girls from age 8 to 16 share their truths and there is no one cookie cutter approach to what adoption means in each child’s life. This book is required reading if your life is touched by adoption and important for the rest of us to get beyond the reoccurring cliches to the deeper truth. 

The Frog Scientist (2009) by Pamela S. Turner. 

Do you want to know what it’s like to be a scientist investigating one of the leading indicators that something is not right with our environment? Follow Dr. Hayes from the lab to the field and back as he tries to solve the mystery of why the frog population is falling so rapidly. Along the way we get a peek at how to test your scientific hypothesis, how to prepare slides of frog tissue and other concrete details for the aspiring scientist. 

Our World of Water: Children and Water Around the World (2008) by Beatrice Hollyer. 

This book takes kids from Mauritania to Peru to Tajikistan and beyond. The power of the book comes from the many pictures. You see an eight year old girl ride off on donkey to fetch water because there is no running water in her village. You see a boy from Bangladesh pumping water with his mother. A boy in Ethiopia herds his family’s cattle and a boy in Peru herds the alpaca. For kids growing up in the U.S. where they are fed commercial after commercial, this book will be a revelation about what it takes to live day to day in many parts of the world.