Central Kansas Library System

Everyone knows that sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach just before diving into a new situation. Sarah Jane Hartwell is scared and doesn't want to start over at a new school. She doesn't know anybody, and nobody knows her. It will be awful. She just knows it. With much prodding from Mr. Hartwell, Sarah Jane reluctantly pulls herself together and goes to school. She is quickly befriended by Mrs. Burton, who helps smooth her jittery transition....

Eight-year-old Emma is just beginning to like her new school when her friend Cynthia starts telling other kids that Emma is, well, a little strange.

"It's the first day of school, and that means a brand-new teacher, Ms. Penny! Pinkalicious misses her old teacher until she comes up with an idea to make the classroom feel a little more familiar and a lot more pinkerrific" --

When Dat starts school in a country where he does not speak the language, everything around him sounds like gibberish until a new friend helps him make sense of his new world.

After being homeschooled her whole life, Heidi Heckelbeck enters a real school in second grade, where she encounters a mean girl named Melanie who makes her feel like an alien.

When the class pet bites the finger of Penelope, a tyrannosaurus rex, she finally understands why she should not eat her classmates, no matter how tasty they are.

Cocoa the horse does not want Cowgirl Kate to go to school without him.

Faizah relates how she feels on the first day her sister, sixth-grader Asiya, wears a hijab to school.

Prehistoric part-dinosaur part-truck machines help each other get ready for their first day of school.