Amelia Bedelia on the Job

Herman Parish's Amelia Bedelia on the Job is a funny school story for 6 year olds about a girl who has no idea what her dad actually does all day.

What happens

It opens with Amelia Bedelia bursting into tears in the middle of a game of tag. Her class is about to start learning about jobs. Everyone else seems to know what their parents do. She doesn't!

She's got clues, mind you. Dad says he's pitching to a client, and that it was a slam dunk. Baseball AND basketball? Maybe he's a coach.

That's the fun of the whole book. Grown-ups use work words and Amelia Bedelia takes every single one literally. A classmate's dad works at a plant, so she pictures forty people crowding round one very tall plant (like the beanstalk). The whole class falls about laughing.

Then her parents explain how they met. Dad made ice cream sodas in a drugstore, pulling a handle back and forth, which made him a "soda jerk". Amelia Bedelia thinks he's fibbing. So it becomes a running joke that her dad was an award-winning jerk (worth knowing if you'd rather not hear that word repeated at the dinner table for a week).

The best part is the class trip to Dad's office. There's a window cleaner who starts at the top and works his way down, and an elevator inspector who says his job has its ups and downs. A lady says she's about to pass out some papers. Amelia Bedelia pushes her into a chair and lifts her feet in the air!

Mrs Shauk is great fun too. The class call her the Hawk, because she can spot trouble with her back turned. She keeps handing out extra reports to anyone who makes a joke, so they soon learn to stop talking.

Then they're all asked to think outside the box. Amelia Bedelia has one big idea, decides it's silly and scrunches it up for the bin. What happens to that crumpled-up drawing is the best bit, so we'll leave it there.

Underneath the jokes it's very warm. Plenty of children have that horrible moment of not knowing an answer everyone else seems to know. And this one finishes up making work sound like fun.

There are a couple of nods to earlier books (the family's holiday gets a mention), but nothing your reader needs to have read first.

What to read next

Want more of Amelia Bedelia and the world of work? Amelia Bedelia Means Business has her taking on jobs of her own. She needs to earn half the money for a new bike, and her very first job is at Pete's Diner.