So, we just hired ourselves a brand new pastor for our church. Her name is Emelia. Naturally, the thing that popped into my mind was Amelia Bedelia, which sounds similar, although spelled slightly differently. anyway, I just had to read an Amelia Bedelia book. I hope our new pastor will forgive me.

So, this book is full of plays on words. Young children, it seems, tend not to understand figures of speech, so take things literally. In this book, Amelia Belelia wants a new bike, but her parents tell her she needs to get a job to make half the money. So, she gets a job as a waitress in training. But, when a customer in a hurry asks for cherry pie, and emphasizes his request by appending "and step on it" to the end of his request, Amelia Belelia does exactly what he asks: she brings the pie to his place, then literally steps on it, squirting cherry pie filling all over the place.

Then, she sets up a lemon aid stand in front of a busy block where there's a prominent car dealer. She makes a huge sign that says, "Lots of Lemons", and places it next to the car dealer's sign. Naturally, that causes rather a lot of trouble.

Well, you get the idea. A short, amusing book with oodles of plays on words. It's not literature, but not a bad way to do some reading.

Amelia Bedelia has a list of chores to complete before the Rogers get home. Once they arrive home, Mrs. Rogers realize her mistake with the list. While Amelia continued working for the Roger's, she always made them lemon-meringue pie. Lets all make a list of 10 chores that you would want Amelia Bedelia to complete at your house. 

Lexile Level: 340L

Amelia Bedilia Books

Guided Reading: Level L

Amelia Bedilia Books are a great tool to teach students about figurative language. In all of her books she takes everything literally. Students could write their own figurative phrases or even share ones from family. This is a good opportunity for students to show understanding through their own creative writing with the help of Amelia Bedilia.

I absolutely loved reading these books as a kid! I remember reading them with my mom a lot. My favorite part is how she takes things so literal. I think this is something we as teachers need to pay attention to as we talk to students from different backgrounds. They may not always understand what we mean and we have to clarify our directions. I think my students would find this book humorous and interesting. I would like to see how the students interpret the directions by asking them to predict what Amelia Bedelia is going to do when she reads the list.

Lexile: 450L

Amelia Bedelia Unleashed by Herman Parish is a chapter book that follows a girl names Amelia Bedelia and she is trying to figure out what type of dog she wants to have.  To solve her question, Amelia starts to help her friends walk their dogs and she tries to help one dog win a dog show.  Through many ups and downs, Amelia finally finds the dog she wants and names it Finally.  This book is great because it shows the struggle children and many people can have with differentiating between figurative and literal language and words with multiple meanings.  An activity that would work with Amelia Bedelia Unleashed is having a discussion about the homonyms and finding those mentioned in the book and discovering the multiple meanings of the words.  Students could create a foldable to help them remember these words.  The Lexile level of Amelia Bedelia Unleashed is 580L (Grades 2 to 3).