5 Recommended books for Year 5

Build your child’s vocabulary and ability to deal with complex English sentences with this week’s recommendations for year 5 students.
“Handled with Morpurgo’s usual zip and feeling.” The Sunday Times
The powerful new novel from the master storyteller – inspired by the true story of one man who might have stopped World War II.
1940. The train is under attacks from German fighters. In the darkness, sheltering in a railway tunnel, the stranger in the carriage with Barney and his mother tells them a story to pass the time.
And what a story. The story of a young man, a young soldier in the trenches of World War I who, on the spur of the moment, had done what he thought was the right thing.
It turned out to have been the worst mistake he ever could have made – a mistake he must put right before it is too late…
“Morris Gleitzman’s children’s stories are among the most widely read and loved.” (AudioFile Magazine)
Once by Morris Gleitzman is the story of a young Jewish boy who is determined to escape the orphanage he lives in to save his Jewish parents from the Nazis in the occupied Poland of the Second World War.
Everybody deserves to have something good in their life. At least Once.
Once I escaped from am orphanage to find Mum and Dad.
Once I saved a girl called Zelda from a burning house.
Once I made a Nazi with a toothache laugh.
My name is Felix. This is my story.
Once is the first in a series of children’s novels about Felix, a Jewish orphan caught in the middle of the Holocaust, from Australian author Morris Gleitzman – author of Bumface and Boy Overboard. The next books in the series are Then, Now and After .
A timeless children’s classic reissued with a stunning new package.
Everyone in Kizzy’s town hates her because she’s half-gypsy – a diddakoi. But Kizzy doesn’t care. All she needs is Gran and her horse, Joe. But when Gran dies and their wagon burns down, Kizzy is all alone. No one wants to look after her and her beloved Joe might get sent to the knacker’s yard. Can Kizzy survive in a hostile world – and save Joe?
‘A fabulous story that crackles with suspense and daring and shows that a bit of cheek will take you a very long way […] A great, pacy read.’ Love Reading
In the first book in the number one bestselling Alex Rider series by Anthony Horowitz, fourteen-year-old Alex is forcibly recruited into MI6. Armed with secret gadgets, he is sent to investigate Herod Sayle, a man who is offering state-of-the-art Stormbreaker computers to every school in the country. But the teenage spy soon finds himself in mortal danger.
Beautiful edition of a much-loved classic. Amazon
Black Beauty is a young black colt and loves roaming Farmer Gray’s fields with his mother. As Black Beauty grows into a handsome stallion, he is trained into the use of a saddle and whip and sold to Squire Gordon of Birtwick Hall. Here, he makes many friends including the angry Ginger, the well-meaning Merrylegs and the elderly Sir Oliver, as well as stablehands James and John. When Squire Gordon has to move abroad to improve his wife’s ill health, Black Beauty is sold again to Earlshall Park. So begins a hard and unsettled life for Black Beauty who is always at the whim of his human owners. Often he is whipped and made to wear blinkers or the bearing rein, at other times he must work as a cab horse on the busy London streets. Will Black Beauty ever be able to roam the fields again as he did in his childhood? What has become of his friends Ginger and Merrylegs?
Rediscover Anna Sewell’s moving tale of the hardships of being an animal in a human world with Scholastic’s classic edition.