Frances O'Roark Dowell

You might be the most brilliant scientist in your elementary school, but cooking family dinner is a chemistry experiment you never signed up for. A pinch of this and a dash of that just does not seem very scientific. But you need to figure out recipes quickly, because there is a ten thousand dollar prize on the line for a major bake-off. To make your life even more complicated, the toughest bully in school has developed an obsession with your homemade brownies. If you cannot supply him with a fresh batch every morning, you are going to get clobbered. With the help of your best friends, you begin to realize that the kitchen is just another kind of laboratory. You will have to keep your cool and measure your ingredients perfectly to win the prize and keep the school bully happy at the same time.

To be the absolute best scientist in the entire fourth grade, you need to set your sights on something massive: outer space. You desperately want to go to Space Camp to simulate a real mission to Mars, but the camp is incredibly expensive and you have to earn the money yourself. Your brilliant plan is to become a dog walker, which pairs you up with a gigantic, hyperactive Yellow Lab named Lemon Drop. Surviving a walk with this massive dog is hard enough, but dealing with his endless amounts of drool is a whole different challenge. With the help of your best friends, you realize that Lemon Drop's messy slobber is actually the perfect ingredient for a brand-new, highly unusual science experiment. You will have to use all your genius logic to manage the dog, run the tests, and secure your ticket to the stars.

You need to make some serious cash, but being a seven-year-old means you are way too young to mow lawns for twenty bucks like your older sister. Earning a single dollar to walk your grumpy neighbor around the block just is not cutting it. When another neighbor offers you a job taking care of her backyard chickens, you jump at the chance to prove you are a responsible businessman. It turns out that hanging out with chickens is surprisingly fun, and it is the only thing that actually gets your grumpy neighbor to smile and leave his house. Once you save up enough chore money, you make the ultimate purchase: your very own pet chicken that lays bright blue eggs. Now that the neighborhood kids are lining up to buy your rare blue eggs, you have to figure out exactly what to do with your brand-new farming fortune.

Your ultimate goal for the fourth grade is simple: you must be the greatest scientist to ever walk the halls. You are well on your way when your rival scientist friend begs you to help her earn a scout badge by cultivating the exact mold that produces penicillin. Being a brilliant expert on all things gross and slimy, you are thrilled to tackle the challenge. But your focus gets completely derailed when your best friend decides to run for class president and demands that you serve as his top campaign manager. If juggling politics and penicillin is not hard enough, you are suddenly stuck with a bizarre new babysitter who acts suspiciously like a teenage alien from the Planet Pink. When she accidentally throws away your prized dried worm collection, your scientific timeline is thrown into total chaos. You will have to use serious problem-solving skills to win the election, survive the alien babysitter, and master the mold.

You thought you were being so clever when you missed school on the day your class picked out vegetables for a giant two-week science project. But your plan backfires completely when you return to discover you have been assigned the one vegetable nobody else wanted: the weird, purple, and totally dirty rutabaga. You are definitely not a vegetable fan, and you certainly never planned on babysitting one. But after you draw a little face on its bumpy skin, you start to realize this odd little plant is actually kind of cool. There is just one massive problem: vegetables rot. If you want to keep your new rutabaga buddy happy, healthy, and entirely rot-free, you are going to have to engineer the absolute best dirt in the world. Get ready to roll up your sleeves, dig into nature, and call in some favors from your backyard chickens to save the day.

You consider yourself the ultimate scientific genius of the fourth grade. You are an absolute expert on studying mold, and you can scientifically prove that you are allergic to girls, telephone calls, and the color purple. The one thing you absolutely do not have is a best friend. Unfortunately, your teacher just paired you up for the massive school science fair with the one kid you actively consider your un-best friend. To make matters a million times worse, this kid wants to base your entire project on dinosaurs, which is incredibly embarrassing and completely third-grade behavior. As you try to figure out how to survive the project without ruining your scientific reputation, you realize the rest of the school hates your new partner just as much as you do. Putting on your detective hat, you decide to investigate exactly why your un-best friend is so unpopular, all while trying to build the perfect erupting volcano.