Help pick a sci-fi book to read aloud to 3rd graders, time sensitive

This is horror, but I loved http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_with_a_Clock_in_Its_Walls.

The True Meaning of Smekday When twelve-year-old Gratuity (“Tip”) Tucci is assigned to write five pages on “The True Meaning of Smekday” for the National Time Capsule contest, she’s not sure where to begin. When her mom started telling everyone about the messages aliens were sending through a mole on the back of her neck? Maybe on Christmas Eve, when huge, bizarre spaceships descended on the Earth and the aliens – called Boov – abducted her mother? Or when the Boov declared Earth a colony, renamed it “Smekland” (in honor of glorious Captain Smek), and forced all Americans to relocate to Florida via rocketpod? In any case, Gratuity’s story is much, much bigger than the assignment. It involves her unlikely friendship with a renegade Boov mechanic named J.Lo.; a futile journey south to find Gratuity’s mother at the Happy Mouse Kingdom; a cross-country road trip in a hovercar called Slushious; and an outrageous plan to save the Earth from yet another alien invasion. Fully illustrated with “photos,” drawings, newspaper clippings, and comics sequences, this is a hilarious, perceptive, genre-bending novel by a remarkable new talent. _______

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borgel, Daniel Pinkwater. Good chance it is in the school library!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_You_Reach_Me Newberry Medal winner that is a homage to A Wrinkle in Time.

The Green Book by Jill Paton Walsh is great. The classic read aloud to third graders is A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle. Daniel Pinkwater, as suggested above, is a good idea.

Since she wants to avoid the classics (in which case, I'd agree with workerant's suggestion of the Tripods series, or suggest Lois Lowry's The Giver), I'd recommend Greg Van Eekhout's fantastic http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1599909189/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/. It's laugh-out-loud funny, just a smidge spooky, and really, really gripping.

Podkayne of Mars features a female protagonist but it very gender segregated. IE:Women are responsible for child raising; ship captians are male. It was progressive for its time but it is less than ideal now.

Jesus Christ, do NOT READ Z for Zachariah to 8-year olds. I had an eighties (and early nineties - nobody told my school librarian the cold war had ended) childhood, full of incredibly terrifying nuclear-disaster books, and they were all horrible and traumatising, but Z for Zachariah has to be one of the worst. I know you said no classics, but Arthur C Clarke wrote more than enough for there to be some left over for children to enjoy on their own. When I was that age, I loved the short stories.

It's out of print, but in case your local library has a copy - at that age I loved http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0380432323/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/, featuring a girl on the moon, her robot friend, the greedy industrialist who wants to steal him, and putting summer camp wilderness survival skills to good use!