Character Strong Booklist- Putnam Heights: Empathy

Champ has everything and can’t get enough; Walter has very little yet always has a smile. Could Empathy help the two boys from different worlds find common ground beyond their love for baseball and potato chips?

For all the ten years of her life, Hà has only known Saigon: the thrills of its markets, the joy of its traditions, and the warmth of her friends close by. But now the Vietnam War has reached her home. Hà and her family are forced to flee as Saigon falls, and they board a ship headed toward hope. In America, Hà discovers the foreign world of Alabama: the coldness of its strangers, the dullness of its food . . . and the strength of her very own family.

Walk through the day with Emily and learn how it feels to notice the wants, needs, and desires of other people. Watch how Empathy changes the way Emily looks at and sees others.

RJ is having another bad day--but with the help of his coach, RJ learns that working as a team and sharing are skills needed not just on the soccer field, but in school and at home too.

In a dusty township in South Africa, Ajani and his friends have earned a brand-new, federation-size soccer ball. They kick. They dribble. They run. They score. These clever boys are football champions! But when a crew of bullies tries to steal their ball, will Ajani and his friends be able to beat them at their own game?

Seventh grader Jordan Banks loves nothing more than drawing cartoons about his life. But instead of sending him to the art school of his dreams, his parents enroll him in a prestigious private school known for its academics, but where Jordan starts to feel very alone.

Told in lively and powerful verse, this book is a beautiful depiction of a modern Native American family. Fry bread is food piled high on a plate and it is time that brings families together for meals and new memories. Fry bread is nation, shared by many, from coast to coast and beyond. Fry bread is us - a celebration of old and new, traditional and modern, similarity and difference.

Howard B. Wigglebottom likes to win, but he learns that nobody wins all the time. Howard learns how to become a teamplayer when his soccer team makes it to finals.

Delly needs new shoes, but she’s a happy little girl nonetheless. Will a prejudiced classmate ruin the Shoebox Social for her?

A little girl collects wildflowers while walking with her distracted father. Students are able to infer during this wordless picture book, how each flower becomes a gift and fills the pages with colors of Kindness.

Enjoy the enchanting and heartwarming story of Red, the neighborhood oak tree who is the neighborhood keeper of wishes.

This story shows how townspeople can work together with whispers to help a fleeing family during the Holocaust.

Picture Book.

An English-speaking girl, a Spanish-speaking man, and a Polish-speaking woman might not be able to converse, but when a sparrow trapped in their subway car needs help, their common concern bridges the language barriers between them.

Temple Grandin was a visual learner and her unique way of thinking helped improve farms and empathize with animals. She amazed everyone when she became a powerful voice in modern science.

When Rosie notices that her classmates are not treating their classmate Fadimata well, she swoops in caped with Kindness to save the day.

Benny Barrows has hit a streak of bad luck. His best friend moved away and he still hasn’t found a new one at school, his father had an accident which Benny blames himself for, and he compares himself to his brother who has autism and is a better biker rider than him. Benny is struggling at school and home, so his mother encourages him to use his big heart to focus on helping others.

This story starts off with a little stone who thinks he will be become something amazing but then soon realizes he had become a dull paper weight. He’s on a mission to become something greater and in the process meets scribble and splatter and they all come up a creative way to bring joy to thousands of people.

When a drought leaves parts of Malawi with no crops to eat or sell, William Kamkwamba has to think of a plan. He has to research a way to solve his problem and decides to build a windmill to bring electricity to his village, which changes the lives of the villagers.

Coen is having a sniffling, sighing, sobbing kind of day. His family thinks they know how to cheer him up. His dad wants to go outside and play, Mom tells her funniest joke, and his little sister shares her favorite teddy. Nothing helps. But one by one, they get quiet and begin to listen. After some time, space, and reassurance, Coen is able to show them what he needs. With poignant text and stunning illustrations, A Blue Kind of Day explores how depression might feel in the body and shows us how to support the people we love with patience, care, and empathy.

Eleven-year-old Melody is not like most people. She can't walk. She can't talk. She can't write. All because she has cerebral palsy. But she also has a photographic memory; she can remember every detail of everything she has ever experienced. She's the smartest kid in her whole school, but NO ONE knows it. Most people--her teachers, her doctors, her classmates--dismiss her as mentally challenged because she can't tell them otherwise. But Melody refuses to be defined by her disability. And she's determined to let everyone know it...somehow.

For Bixby Alexander Tam (nicknamed Bat), life tends to be full of surprises--some of them good, some not so good. Today, though, is a good-surprise day. Bat's mom, a veterinarian, has brought home a baby skunk, which she needs to take care of until she can hand him over to a wild-animal shelter. But the minute Bat meets the kit, he knows they belong together. And he's got one month to show his mom that a baby skunk might just make a pretty terrific pet. This sweet and thoughtful novel chronicles Bat's experiences and challenges at school with friends and teachers and at home with his sister and divorced parents.

Virgil Salinas is shy and kindhearted and feels out of place in his crazy-about-sports family. Valencia Somerset, who is deaf, is smart, brave, and secretly lonely, and she loves everything about nature. Kaori Tanaka is a self-proclaimed psychic, whose little sister, Gen, is always following her around. And Chet Bullens wishes the weird kids would just stop being so different so he can concentrate on basketball. They aren't friends, at least not until Chet pulls a prank that traps Virgil and his pet guinea pig at the bottom of a well. This disaster leads Kaori, Gen, and Valencia on an epic quest to find missing Virgil.

Five years. That's how long Coyote and her dad, Rodeo, have lived on the road in an old school bus, criss-crossing the nation. It's also how long ago Coyote lost her mom and two sisters in a car crash. Coyote hasn't been home in all that time, but when she learns that the park in her old neighborhood is being demolished--the very same park where she, her mom, and her sisters buried a treasured memory box--she devises an elaborate plan to get her dad to drive 3,600 miles back to Washington state in four days...without him realizing it. Along the way, they'll pick up a strange crew of misfit travelers. Over the course of thousands of miles, Coyote will learn that going home can sometimes be the hardest journey of all...but that with friends by her side, she just might be able to turn her "once upon a time" into a "happily ever after."

Rose Howard is obsessed with homonyms. She's thrilled that her own name is a homonym, and she purposely gave her dog Rain a name with two homonyms (Reign, Rein), which, according to Rose's rules of homonyms, is very special. Not everyone understands Rose's obsessions, her rules, and the other things that make her different - not her teachers, not other kids, and not her single father. When a storm hits their rural town, rivers overflow, the roads are flooded, and Rain goes missing. Rose's father shouldn't have let Rain out. Now Rose has to find her dog, even if it means leaving her routines and safe places to search.

In Caitlin's world, everything is black or white. Things are good or bad. Anything in between is confusing. That's the stuff Caitlin's older brother, Devon, has always explained. But now Devon's dead and Dad is no help at all. Caitlin wants to get over it, but as an eleven-year-old girl with Asperger's, she doesn't know how. When she reads the definition of closure, she realizes that is what she needs. In her search for it, Caitlin discovers that not everything is black and white--the world is full of colors--messy and beautiful.

This book takes a closer look at The Boys & the Frogs fable. The first chapters introduce who Aesop may have been and what a fable is. The following chapters will feature the fable in its entirety and important lessons one can learn from the fable, like why one should empathize with others. QR Codes in the book give readers access to book-specific resources to further their learning.