By Peggy Parish
A new housekeeper follows every instruction on her list to the letter, which turns out to be exactly the trouble.
It's Amelia Bedelia's first day working for Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, and they've left her a list of chores. Change the towels. Dust the furniture. Draw the drapes. Put out the lights. Dress the chicken. She's cheerful and eager, and she does every single one. Which is to say she snips fancy shapes into the towels, sprinkles dusting powder all over the furniture, sits down and sketches a picture of the drapes, and hangs the lightbulbs outside on the clothesline. The Rogers come home to the wreckage and are ready to fire her on the spot. Then Mrs. Rogers tastes the lemon meringue pie.
This is the first idiom book and still the best of them, and the joke sits in a shape a beginning reader can actually hold: one instruction, one wrong-but-technically-correct answer, turn the page, do it again. Your child gets to be the one who's in on it while the grown-ups are baffled, and that's a feeling worth a lot of reading. The sentences are short and repeat on purpose, so a child sounding words out can carry the book alone. One real caveat: every laugh depends on your child already knowing what 'draw the drapes' is supposed to mean. A child still learning English may just see a woman drawing a picture and miss that a joke happened at all. Say the real meaning out loud before you turn the page and the whole thing clicks into place.