At Guilford Central School, the entire school – kindergarten through sixth grade – gets together for Community Music Time. Sometimes musicians from the greater community come in to perform. But on the day Dorothy's List was there, it was small ensembles of sixth graders who took the spotlight to highlight a book they'd read.

At the Orchard Elementary School in South Burlington, students come from a variety of cultural backgrounds. In fact, about a third of the students speak a language other than English at home. Last fall, a group of Orchard fifth-graders gathered to discuss It Ain’t So Awful, Falafel, a novel about an Iranian-born girl living in California in the late 1970s and early 1980s – much like author Firoozeh Dumas.

Westford Elementary School students have broken up into small groups, clustered around library tables — but in this case, the tables are figurative life rafts. The students are discovering a nearly-forgotten piece of history, as they dive into the nonfiction book Lost in the Pacific, 1942 by Vermont author Tod Olson .

Readers at the Neshobe School in Brandon are really getting into Adam Gidwitz ’s book The Inquisitor’s Tale, which takes place in the Middle Ages — meaning that with the help of imagination and technology, they are literally putting themselves into the narrative.

Students at Dover Elementary are trying their hands at making origami birds. Paper birds like these play an interesting role in Kelly Barnhill ’s fantastical novel The Girl Who Drank the Moon . The birds in the book are magical, and they can be both helpful and vicious.

If you were listening closely a few weeks ago in northern Vermont, you may have heard what sounded like a secret colony of "Bigfoots." But no, it was just a group of Hyde Park Elementary School students acting like the characters in The Littlest Bigfoot.

A four-legged friend stopped by to spend time with first and fifth grade reading buddies at Chamberlin School in South Burlington — a timely visit, as the older students had recently read about a supportive dog in Paul Griffin 's novel When Friendship Followed Me Home.

About a hundred students from elementary schools in Swanton, Highgate and Sheldon packed into the children's room of the Swanton Public Library on a recent Friday the 13th — a fitting date to welcome author Marina Cohen to talk about her spooky novel The Inn Between.

In the book The Wild Robot , a robot named Roz washes up on a remote island and must learn survival skills. Northfield Elementary School students recently gathered in their school library to show off what they learned about the book by way of a friendly trivia competition.

The War That Saved My Life, by author Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, is a World War II-era story about a girl and her brother who have a chance to escape their cruel childhood when London is evacuated during the war.