After a class field trip to the art museum, fourth-graders Finley, Henry, and Olivia are assigned a project that is supposed to define art, which is difficult, because they all liked very different paintings--but for their group project they come up with a presentation that captures their combined vision.

Second-grader Freddy hates being the middle one in the family until he gets a part in the school play.

When Daisy, a middle child, is invited to spend the night at her friend's house, her family finally pays attention to her.

Tony, a macaroni penguin, is a middle child with very exasperating siblings, and although he never looks for trouble, it often finds him.

Every year the fourth grade has to do a plan and complete a service project for the school and community, and after a particularly unappetizing school lunch Finley suggests that they should plant a vegetable garden--but when the radishes she and her friends Henry and Olivia plant take too long to sprout she gets very frustrated.

A little pig in a big city leads to lots of trouble! Josie Shilling's family is too big, their cramped city house is too small, and she feels like no one is ever on her side. Then, on Thanksgiving Day, her older brother, Tom, brings home a pink, squirmy bundle wrapped in an old football jersey--a piglet he rescued from a nearby farm. Her name is Hamlet.

The middle child in a family of monsters, Bub feels ignored and overlooked, but when he wishes for invisibility, he discovers how much his family loves and misses him.

Gregory Korenstein-Jasperton is an eleven-year-old boy who likes to write stories and poems and is not excited by math, but he has a problem--he is the middle child in a family of math geniuses and his father expects him to participate in the City Math contest.

Azaleah's older sister Nia is going to be the star of the school musical but things keep going wrong at the rehearsals (missing batteries, disappearing props, microphones that suddenly do not work); Mr. Guidi, the director, blames the ghost of Thespis, but Azaleah suspects that somebody is actually sabotaging the play--and she is determined to use her detective skills to uncover the culprit, and set things right so the play will be a complete success...

Victoria Torres is not the best math student, so when her older sister, Sofia, captain of their middle school math team, co-opts her to fill in for a team member who quit Vicka is not sure how to feel--she would certainly like to help the team win the conference trophy, but first she must get Sophia to see that it is her aggressive bossiness that is alienating the other team members.