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).    

In My Heart: A Book of Feelings by Jo Witek is a picture book full of different emotions and feelings that people experience all of the time.  Each page introduces a certain way the author is feeling and the author expresses the emotion using a multitude of figurative language, especially similes, metaphors, and personification.  The last line on each page list the feeling the author is having, like happy or sad.  This book would be a great introduction to a figurative language lesson.  After reading In My Heart: A Book of Feelings, students could pick a feeling and describe it using different types of figurative language. According to the Flesch-Kincaid readability leveling system, In My Heart: A Book of Feelings is a level of 2.7 (2nd grade to 3rd grade). 

This book by Dr. Seuss presents students with different sounds of real world objects and animals. This book is an easy read for students. Students will experience rhymes and word sounds, or onomatopoeia. An interesting activity to do with this text is having students guess an object or animal from a particular sound. I will have a paper bag with multiple items it in and I will provide a sound for the item. The students will try to guess the item in the paper bag. 

Reading Level: Lexile NP (non-prose)

Grades: PreK-3rd