On the first day of school, Franklin is a little nervous, but his teacher, Mr. Owl, knows just what to do.

A second-grader writes a television station with reasons why his teacher would make a good president, but only if she can continue teaching till the end of the year.

Alexander is used to finding monsters everywhere in Stermont, but now the school is being turned into an icebox by giant meat-eating vegetables--and his friend Rip has gone missing.

Spunky third-grader Dyamonde Daniel misses her old neighborhood, but when she befriends a boy named Free, another new student at school, she finally starts to feel at home.

Stella Endicott loves her teacher, Miss Liliana, and she is thrilled when the class is assigned to write a poem. Stella crafts a beautiful poem about Mercy Watson, the pig who lives next door - a poem complete with a metaphor and full of curiosity and courage. But Horace Broom, Stella's irritating classmate, insists that Stella's poem is full of lies and that pigs do not live in houses. And when Stella and Horace get into a shouting match in the classroom,...

Sophie's is hurt when the other children laugh at her painting of her favorite tree--but when she explains her painting everybody understands what she was trying to do.

Gilbert is nervous about portraying George Washington in front of the class, and he feels even worse when he leaves his main prop at home and allows another student to take the blame.

After attaching their names and addresses to balloons which they launch into the air, Mike and his elementary school classmates wait anxiously to see whose travels the farthest.

When Eva Wingdale sees something large and white flying above her she is convinced that it is a ghost, although most of the other owls just laugh at her--until something large and heavy and white lands on the school roof.