"A distinctive new voice: Rex Ogle's story of starting middle school on the free lunch program is timely, heartbreaking, and true. Free Lunch is the story of Rex Ogle's first semester in sixth grade. Rex and his baby brother often went hungry, wore secondhand clothes, and were short of school supplies, and Rex was on his school's free lunch program. Grounded in the immediacy of physical hunger and the humiliation of having to announce it every day...

"How to handle the increasing academic demands of middle school, organizational skills and time management, how to be self-determined, have grit, and a sense of agency"--

"Hey. We go to Milldale Middle School. We're very different in lots of ways, but we're all good friends. A couple months ago, we were just hanging out when these kids came over..." So begins the journey of Jack, Jen, Chris, Abby, Mateo, and Michelle-six students just trying to figure it all out in middle school. Be Confident in Who You Are, the first book in the new Middle School Confidential series, follows these characters as they work to meet new...

The first day of school in a new middle school can be overwhelming and bewildering - the maze of hallways, the hundreds of identical lockers, the locker combinations and sticky locks, the far-flung classrooms, the many teachers, the lunchroom full of unfamiliar faces. Anxiety over the strangeness and newness of all this can be running high, and making the transition from scared new student to supremely confident and self-assured middle schooler can...

"Take a large group of kids in puberty, send them to a new school, and add a generous dose of tests, homework, and hormones, not to mention diverse personalities, bland food, and unpleasant odors. That's middle school, and it can be a little...weird."--Page 4 of cover.