Amelia Bedelia is a fun series that students would love. There are a variety of lessons to go along with it. The first lesson I would use this book for is to teach idioms. The students could "be detectives" and search for what her phrases really mean. You could also teach cause and effect with this book.

Lexile Level: 340L

Amelia Bedelia is so funny!  Your students will love to read about all of her crazy mishaps.  With Amelia Bedelia, you can teach about idioms, which would be helpful for English speaking students or ELL students.  Also, students can practice detailed, expository writing to help Amelia not make so many mistakes!

Grade: 4th

This book is full of homophones, figurative language, and idioms. The pictures will be sure to make kids giggle. I love everything about this book. It plays on the misconceptions that children have that do not understand figurative language.  After reading this story aloud to the class, we will discuss these parts of speech. The students and teacher will provide multiple examples of homophones, such as ate/eight, bear/bare, cent/scent/sent/, deer/dear, pair/pear, etc. The class will then be prompted to provide examples of idioms such as waking up on the wrong side of the bed, time flying, raining cats and dogs, having a green thumb, etc. These examples will be written on the board. The class will talk about how words can be confusing because they sound the same but mean different things. After the discussion, the students will come up with their own idiom or homophone. Then, they will draw what they think it looks like just as Fred Gwynne did in A Chocolate Moose For Dinner.

Amelia Bedelia takes everything people say literally but always does what she says she is going to do.  This leads the town to the idea that Amelia Bedelia should run for Mayor. Along the way she confuses homophones, homonyms, and idioms for different meanings. Students could use this book when learning about homophones, homonyms, and/or idioms. They could read the story and identify each homophones, homonyms, and/or idioms and tell what the characters actually meant versus what Amelia Bedelia mistakes it for.