When Bean's parents leave her in the care of her older sister Nancy for the afternoon, she enlists her neighbor and best friend Ivy to come over and teach Nancy how to be a really good babysitter.

Second-grade best friends Ivy and Bean beg for ballet lessons, then, when they are cast as squids in their first recital, scheme to find a way out of what seems to be boring, hard, and potentially embarrassing.

Ivy and Bean try to make money by writing a newspaper about Pancake Court but the neighbors are not pleased to read about themselves.

Everyone in second grade seems set on breaking a world record and friends Ivy and Bean are no exception, deciding to become the youngest people ever to discover a dinosaur skeleton.

Relates three times that nine-year-old Iggy got into trouble, two of which he does not regret and one for which he is very, very sorry.

Eleven-year-old Miri Gill feels left out in her family, which has two sets of twins and her, until she travels back in time to 1935 and discovers Molly, her own lost twin, and brings her back to the present day.